


DOWN

by GreyscaleCourtier



Series: DOWN [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Alternate Universe - Psychics/Psionics, Character Death, Conspiracy AU, Dad's name is James because I say so, Everybody's got psychic powers and none of them know it yet, Gen, Government Conspiracy, Medical Experimentation, On the Run AU, Seriously no ships please stop asking, Violence, everybody's on the lam from Betty Crocker, no ships, secondary character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-25 01:38:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 67,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3791806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyscaleCourtier/pseuds/GreyscaleCourtier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is John Egbert, and today was a pretty normal day until your dad told you to get in the car and run.</p><p>Now, you're on a wild cross-country road trip, fleeing someone who wants you and all your friends dead, or worse.</p><p>You're starting to be able to do some pretty weird stuff.</p><p>And on top of everything, you think you probably missed your History exam.</p><p>((Government Conspiracy AU))</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. DOWN

You text Rose under your desk all day and come to the conclusion that your parents would make a hilarious, but ultimately doomed, couple.

You Skype Dave over lunch and end up blocking him when you make an innocent typo that he takes and runs too far with, culminating in a dramatic declaration of love to a nearby smuppet.

You call Jade on the bus home (it’s still morning to her) and let her rant and rave about how Becquerel heard her complain that they were out of cereal, and consequently teleported a live and very upset dolphin into her kitchen. (“He was just trying to feed us, but _still!”)_

All in all, it was a pretty normal day right up until you step off the school bus, unlock your front door, and step into your home.

“No, he doesn’t!” Dad’s angry voice freezes you in your tracks. “And neither does she, Jacob, we have guidelines for a good damn reason!”

You forget to hold onto the front door, which falls shut with a thud. You jump.

Dad appears at the kitchen door, phone in hand. “Oh… Listen, Jacob, we’ll talk about this later, my son just got home. I’ll call… yes. Yes. Goodbye.” He clicks the phone off and turns back to you with a smile. “Hi, John. How was school?”

You realize you’re still standing by the door, and trail after Dad into the kitchen. “It was okay, I guess. I thought you’d still be at work.”

Dad hangs up the phone with his back to you, carefully winding the cord up. “I was, but one of the machines on the factory floor crashed and they sent everyone home.”

Oh. That’s probably why he was yelling about guidelines. “Huh. Did you get it working again?”

“They’re calling someone in tomorrow.” He finally turns to you and ruffles your hair, which you try and fail to avoid. “Go wash up for dinner, I’m making chicken.”

You make a grab at his fedora (and miss) before darting out the door and up the stairs. As you dump all your school shit on the floor, a flashing notification on your computer screen catches your eye. Huh. You _know_ you shut it down before you left this morning. Did Dad go on your computer while you were gone? No, he wouldn’t do that; besides, you have it password-protected. Just then, your phone rings; Texas area code, unknown contact. You pick up.

“Unblock me on Pesterchum before I drive up there to Asstown Washington and shit on your desk,” Dave says before you can say hello.

“No. What poor kid did you steal this phone from?”

“I’m borrowing my bro’s, this is important. Go unblock me, I need to send you a link.”

"To what? If it’s more weird tentacle porn, I’m reporting your account.”

“Dude. No. A) hentai is _art,_ and B) it’s an article about how fucking shady your dad’s company is.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Egbert. This is important. You’re my baby daddy. You owe me this.”

You almost hang up right then and there, but the flashing Pesterchum notification catches your eye. “Hey Dave, your bro is invasive and stalkery, right?”

“Them’s fightin’ words, John. I’m catching a bus down there to kick your ass and defend the family honor. But honestly yeah he is, why do you ask?”

“I kind of think my dad went on my computer while I was at school? I mean, I remember shutting it off this morning, but it’s on and logged in, but my dad doesn’t seem like _that_ kind of dad, you know? Plus it’s passworded.”

“Egbert. Your password is ‘password.’”

You jump. “How the hell did you know that?”

“Oh my god. It’s _actually_ ‘password’? This is the best day of my _fucking life.”_

“Shut up, you dick! This is serious!”

Dad’s voice drifts up the stairs. “Five minutes ‘til dinner, John!”

You lean away from the phone and yell back. “Okay, just a minute!”

“Hey, you know,” Dave is saying, “I think my bro is doing the same thing, getting all snakey and weird. Weirder than usual. Like, okay, two nights ago he woke me up at ass o’ clock in the morning for a strife on the roof. It was _raining,_ Egbert. I could have _died.”_

“And that’s weird… how?”

“Dude.” You can hear him rolling his eyes. “Bro does a lot of weird-ass shit, but he doesn’t wake me up that late on a school night, you know? I’ve got an academic future to nurture.”

“Wow, yeah, super weird then. At least you don’t have a live dolphin in your kitchen.”

“John, what the literal fuck.”

“You haven’t talked to Jade today? Oh man, go call her right now and ask her about the dolphin. Now. I gotta go eat, bye.”

“John, okay, hang on, go unblock me though, for real, I’m not—” Click.

You’re sitting down to dinner when you remember you never did check that flashing notification icon. Oh well, you’ll get to it later. Maybe you’ll even unblock Dave while you’re at it.

“So who were you talking to up there?” Dad asks, setting down a plate of buns.

“Mm. Dave. He was mad, I blocked him on Pesterchum earlier.” You reach over and grab two.

“Huh. How’s he doing? I haven’t heard much from him lately.”

“Okay, I guess. I mean, he complains about his brother being neurotic and weird, but he always does that, so I wouldn’t worry.”

Dad pauses before releasing a light chuckle. “Well, it can’t be easy for either of them. It’s a wonder Dave has turned out as well as he has.”

“I’m well-adjusted though, right?” you ask, immediately shoving an entire chicken wing into your mouth straight-faced.

Dad laughs and throws a wadded napkin at you. “You could’ve turned out worse, I suppose.”

Your phone hums in your pocket, but Dad has a rule about electronics at the table, so you let it buzz and go to voicemail. Probably just Dave again. It rings and goes to voicemail three more times, and then, very faintly, you hear the telltale pop of a Pesterchum message from your computer upstairs. You glance at Dad. Did he go on your laptop while you were gone? Should you even ask him about it?

You clear your throat cautiously. “Hey so um, did you, uh… clean my room or something today? While I was at school? Cause my computer was on, and uh, I remember turning it off, and I’m just thinking like, did I go crazy and forget, or did…?”

About halfway through your rambling, Dad fixes you with a strange look, and now he’s set down his fork and shoots a quick glance at his phone. “No, I haven’t been in your room today. Isn’t it password-protected anyway, though?”

Your phone vibrates again, distracting you. You pick at your food, suddenly not hungry. “Yeah, I just… huh. Thought I shut it off. That’s weird.” You try to laugh it off, but the chuckle dies somewhere in your throat.

The kitchen phone rings, startling you both. Dad’s up to get it before the first ring fades. While he picks it up, you sneak a glance at your phone.

Three missed calls from Dave.

Two from Rose.

While you’re contemplating that, Jade calls. You almost tap the answer button, but Dad’s voice cuts in, steady but harsh.

“John. Go upstairs and get your laptop, its charger, and your phone charger.”

Chills run down your spine. You stand up, Jade’s call going to voicemail, but your feet won’t move. “Wh… Dad?” Your heart is pounding and you aren’t sure why.

“Right now, son.”

You rip yourself away and make it to the stairs before stopping to listen.

“…far away?” Dad is saying, quiet and fast. “I can’t just… Does Dirk… okay. Yes. We are, Jacob, right now. Did you see how l… no, listen to me, we will come to you. Don’t put her in danger. You said drones, are they the mech… right. We’ll get Dirk and meet in New York, we can restock and get back to you from… _John!”_

You jump, scurry up the stairs, and yell from the top. “Give me ten seconds!” You dart into your room and snatch up your backpack, dumping out the contents and stuffing the laptop charger inside it. You cram your phone charger in too, turn to your computer, and freeze.

Something is staring back at you.

A face takes up the entire screen, like a screamer Dave would send you, but it’s not moving or making sound. The only visible features are staring black eyes and a set of grinning, neon pink lips. It blinks once, startling you into dropping the phone charger, and disappears.

You suddenly, desperately, do not want to touch your laptop.

But Dad yells your name with an edge of fear that cuts through your panic, and you snatch up the computer and your phone charger, stuff them in your backpack, and barrel back down the stairs. Dad is there, digging through the closet by the front door, and comes out with two black duffel bags. “Get Nanna,” he says without looking at you, and goes outside.

You turn to the urn of ashes over the fireplace, and your heart sinks.

You aren’t coming back.

You grab Nanna’s ashes and follow Dad outside.

~

“Okay, Dad, I get that we’re in a hurry, but… what the hell is happening?” You buckle into the backseat and settle Nanna’s urn securely in your backpack.

“We’re…” Dad jerks the wheel sideways to avoid a wandering dog. You slip and hit the door, and he looks back to make sure you’re okay. “We’re driving to Texas, right now. We have to meet up with the Striders.”

“The… uhh. Like. Dave, my Internet friend that you’ve never met? That Strider?”

“And his brother Dirk, yes, those Striders.”

You realize your phone is going off in your hand. You glance down. Eight missed calls from Dave. Six from Jade. Four from Rose. The number calling you now is the one you recognize as Dave’s bro’s phone. You look to Dad, but he’s peering intently at the sky as he maneuvers you out of the suburban neighborhood. You pick up.

“Dave?”

“Nope, the other one. Egbert, your dad there?” The voice on the other end is rough, deep, and thickly accented.

“Yeah… hang on.” You’re dying of curiosity, and you’re terrified, and it’s been maybe an hour since you stepped off the bus, and you haven’t forgotten those grinning pink lips and blank eyes on your computer screen – but you aren’t an idiot. You can tell this isn’t the time to start asking the questions burning you up.

So you hold the phone to Dad and say, “It’s Dave’s bro.”

Dad snatches your phone. “Dirk? Yes. No, we’re getting out now, we’re in the car. We’re headed down to you. …No, absolutely not. Wait there. Jake says they haven’t mobilized in Texas yet. We’ll get to you before… Nothing yet, I told him.” Dad’s eyes flash briefly to meet yours in the rearview mirror. “I know, Dirk. But for now, you both are safest in the crowd where you are. Have you heard from Lalonde?”

Lalonde? Dad knows Rose’s mom now, too? You press your forehead against the cool glass of the window and try not to panic or pass out.

“Well, keep in touch with her. Use Dave if you need to. Only cut off contact if you see drones. Don’t call Jake, he’s shut off all transmissions to keep them from finding the island.”

Island. You close your eyes. You’d bet your eyeteeth that he’s talking about Jade’s home, and Jake is her granddad’s name. How the hell does Dad know all your friends? What are drones? What, exactly, are you running from, and why is it coming after you – and apparently the Striders? What the fuck is chasing you?

Just then, you realize Dad is saying your name. You open your eyes to find him handing your phone back and giving you instructions. “…Jade. Okay? Every thirty minutes, do you hear me?”

“No. I mean, okay, wait, back up, _what?”_

“I said, we’re setting up a daisy chain of contact. The Striders will be in contact with the Lalondes for the next ten minutes, while we’re in contact with the Harleys, okay? Call Jade right now, I’ll keep explaining while you do.”

You nod, speechless, and press speed-dial 3. Jade picks up on the first ring.

“John?” Her voice is frantic, which doesn’t do much to help your nerves. “Please, please, tell me you know what’s happening, _please,_ I’m really worried and confused right now.”

“Put her on speaker,” Dad says. “Jade? This is John’s father. Are you with your grandfather?”

“No, he had to go down to the lab, but I have Bec.”

“Good. That’s good, wait for him. I was just telling John our immediate plan.” Dad pauses to take a deep breath. “Dave or his brother are currently calling the Lalondes, just like what we’re doing here. In ten minutes, we’re all going to hang up and switch. Jade, you will be calling Dave. John, you wait for a call from Rose. Then after another ten minutes, we switch again. Dave will call us, and Jade, you call Rose. Ten minutes after that, we go back to this configuration. Do you both understand?”

Jade gives a shaky _yeeeees,_ and you just nod at his reflection in the rearview mirror.

“If someone hangs up abruptly, don’t call them back. That means something’s gone wrong. Send a text to the other two and wait.” Dad swerves around a corner. You’re finally almost out of the subdivision.

“Wh…” Your sentence catches and sticks in your dry mouth. You struggle to swallow and try again. “What are we supposed to talk about?”

“It doesn’t matter. The point is being in contact.”

“What’s going on?” Jade finally shouts.

There’s a beat of silence. In the rearview, you can see Dad glance away to think of an answer. Finally, he speaks, slowly and carefully. “A long time ago, Jade, your grandfather, Rose’s mother, David’s brother, and myself… We found out some incriminating things about someone very powerful. We split up for safety, but we set up plans and guidelines in case… something like this happened. Right now, this powerful person is trying to find us, so we’re going into deeper hiding. Jade, our hope is to all arrive at your island, because the person looking for us doesn’t know it exists… John?”

Your eyes jerk open. You hadn’t realized you’d closed them. You meet Dad’s eyes in the mirror. He’s giving you the same concerned look he did when you had the flu last summer and your fever spiked to 104. You sit up straight and try to mentally shake yourself awake. “Yeah, I get it. Sorry.”

Dad opens his mouth to say something else, but a distant – and yet somehow very very close – crash cuts him off. His eyes widen and the car lurches forward with a sudden burst of speed. You twist around in your seat and see a towering ball of fire and smoke rising from deep in the neighborhood. You only see it for an instant before the car swings around a corner, but it was enough. You know that was your home.

~

When you hang up with Jade, it takes less than thirty seconds for your phone to light up with Rose’s number. Honestly you just want to lie down and not think for an hour or two, but you dutifully pick up before the first ring fades. “Egbert residence,” you say casually, because if you can pretend everything’s okay then maybe Rose will play along, and if Rose pretends everything is okay then maybe you won’t break down.

“Good evening, Mr. Egbert, I hope you’re well?” Rose says, and you’re so relieved she’s playing along that it makes you dizzy.

“What do you mean evening? It’s like, four in the afternoon.”

“Mmm. Time zones, John.”

“Oh yeah. Damn.” You can’t think of anything else to say, and start to flounder.

Thankfully, Rose came prepared. “Speaking of time, this whole thing couldn’t have happened at a more opportune moment. Had it been a day later, I would’ve had to perform a _group project_ in Earth Sciences. With _other students._ About _volcanoes.”_

That drags a chuckle out of you. The way Dad’s shoulders lose a little tension doesn’t go unnoticed by you. “Ouch, yeah, good thing you got out of that. Your teammates would’ve been miserable.” The weight of anxiety in your chest eases just a bit when you catch Rose’s quiet breath of laughter.

“I’m not a good student?” she says in a half-hurt, half-mocking tone.

“Rose, no. You’re a fantastic student. You could probably teach half your classes. What you suck ass at is teamwork.” You pause to think. “Although, now that I’m thinking about it… I had a Spanish oral presentation to do tomorrow, so this is really convenient timing for me, too.”

“There’s some psychological symbolism there, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, I hate giving oral. You’ve made that joke before.” Up front, Dad suffers a sudden coughing fit.

You banter with Rose until your ten minutes are up. As you wait for Dave to call, you realize with faint amusement that you never did unblock him on Pesterchum. Before you can do anything about it, though, your phone lights up with Dave’s contact picture. (It’s a screencap of Sweet Bro. You haven’t told him that, though. You always tell him you’re refusing to read his shitty webcomic on principle, but you’ve set up a ping to alert you when there’s new pages. You’ll never give him the satisfaction of knowing that, though.)

When you pick up, you don’t even get to say hello. “You still haven’t unblocked me, you dickhead. Also, Bro wants to know where you are.”

“Dad, Dave’s bro wants to know where we are.”

“Just passed the Oregon state line. We’re on I-90.”

You relay the information and lapse into silence. You look out the window at the overcast sky, the clouds being whipped into roiling foam by an indecisive headwind.

Dave breaks the silence first. “This sucks donkey balls, Egbert.”

“I know.”

“So many donkey balls.”

“I know.”

“I mean, this whole situation sucks donkey balls like nobody’s goddamn business. Donkey ball vacuum. One after the other. Donkey testicles stretching ahead for eternity and oblivion.”

“I get it, Dave.”

“Assticle-Sucker 5,000, registered trademark, patent pending.”

“Dave.”

“Okay, I’m done. But seriously, I’m going crazy here. And Bro isn’t helping, either.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Straight-up barricaded the windows. He pushed the futon up against the door. And we’re out of food, of-fucking-course. How many hours until you get here and deliver me from this hellhole?”

“Thirty-one,” says Dad when you ask.

“Fuck,” Dave says with real feeling. “I’m gonna starve before the drones get me.”

“The… what?”

“Drones. The things trying to find us, so Bro says.”

“Oh.” You shoot a glance at Dad briefly, but he’s focused on the road. “What are they, exactly?”

“Dunno. Killer robots, proba… holy shit, it’s actually killer robots, you should have seen Bro’s face when I said that.”

You imagine a Pacific Rim-esque mecha-bot ripping your house apart and wince, but say nothing. Dave falls silent too, and the lull in conversation reminds you of the face on your computer screen. You wedge the phone between your shoulder and ear, and set about digging your laptop out of your backpack. With Dad in the front seat and Dave on the line, you feel brave enough to face down anything that pops up on your screen. You boot it up…

…a blank desktop.

You sigh in relief and open Pesterchum. You’d always wondered why Dad had made your laptop its own wifi hotspot, when you never even took it out of your room – now you know, apparently. You unblock turntechGodhead. “Okay you insufferable prick, you are officially unblocked.”

“Wait, you have Internet? Shit, maybe this cross-country road trip with the Egberts won’t be an I Spy-filled nightmare after all.” You open your mouth to retort, but Dave steamrolls right over you. “Anyway, I’m sending you that link now, go read it. Our ten minutes are about up, see you in a bit.”

The line goes dead. You sigh and wait a few seconds before dialing Jade again. As it rings, you click the sketchy bit.ly link that pops up in Dave’s chat box. Up comes a predictable janky, ad-riddled conspiracy site with way too many exclamation points per sentence. You snort under your breath at the title:

**[!!!!! CrockerCorp Confirmed fOr Conspiracy Conflict !!!!!]**

Why did they need to put “Conflict”? Other than for the alliteration? You’re tempted to shut the laptop in disgust, but truth be told, if you’re going to be in this car for 30-ish more hours, you’re gonna need some timewasters.

Jade had picked up some time ago, but only now does she speak up as you’re scrolling down the page. “I’m worried.”

You suppress a bad _hi Worried, I’m John_ joke. Not the time, Egbert. Instead, you say, “Yeah. Me too.”

“Even Bec is worried. His fur’s getting all staticky and he keeps trying to follow Grandpa around and whines when he gets locked out of the lab.”

“At least he isn’t teleporting dolphins anymore, right?”

She’s silent in the face of your attempted humor. You turn your attention back to the article; if Jade wants to talk, she’ll talk.

**[DISTURBING new information has come to light! Regarding CrockerCorp, the parent company of notorious baked goods regime Betty Crocker! Sources have revealed that IN ADDITION to the illegal experiments carried out in the mid-90s! CrockerCorp has given OBCSENE amounts of Hush Money to large portions of the United States Government!Including but perhaps not limited to?: The FDA! NASA! the ARMY AND DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE! Is the Crocker matriarch trying to buy out the military!? What is her interest in outer space?!]**

You pinch the bridge of your nose and sigh. Only a paragraph in, and you need a break. You check to make sure Jade’s still connected; she is.

Pesterchum pops. You move automatically to open it before it hits you – all your friends are accounted for. No one should be Pestering you. You freeze, for a moment vividly recalling neon pink lips, stretched distorted across the screen.

“What was that?” Dad asks.

“P…esterchum,” you say slowly. “But everyone I talk to is… um. On the phone.”

“What?” comes Jade’s voice, shrill in your ear. “Who is it?”

“It might just be spam,” you reason. “Pesterchum is full of spammers.” But your cursor still hovers uncertainly over the flashing notifications. Two unread messages. Right – you forgot the one that had been there earlier today, that caught your attention before dinner.

“Don’t open it,” Jade says at the same time Dad says, “Go ahead and see.”

You click the red bubble.

\-- gallowsCalibrator began pestering ectoBiologist --

GC: 1 JST13

GC: G4 lLØ0WS FFØR

\-- gallowsCalibrator ceased pestering ectoBiologist --

You sigh. “It’s spam. It’s just spam again.”

“You’re sure?” Dad raises an eyebrow at you in the rearview.

“Yeah. I’ve gotten these exact messages before from the same chumhandle.”

“Which one is it this time?” Jade asks.

“The… gallowsCalibrator. The one with the random numbers.”

“Ugh. That’s the one that kept hassling you even after you changed handles, right?”

“Yeah.” You shut off Pesterchum and push the overheating laptop off your legs, opting to look out the window at the freeway flashing by. Thunder crashes off in the distance somewhere, and you notice Dad relax. You catch his eye as the first spatter of rain hits the windshield. He gestures at the clouds. “Drones don’t go out in the rain. The air currents mess with their flight patterns.”

“Dave says they’re killer robots,” you tell him, only half-joking.

“More or less.”

You don’t feel much better.

Jade hangs up a few minutes later, trading you off to Rose. She sits with you in silence after trading pleasantries, until Dad has you ask her if she and her mom have a “safety net” ready.

There’s a faint rustle, some staticky mumbling, and then a new voice comes on the line: “…damn, get your mitts off. Mom Lalonde here, Egbert says what?”

Dad reaches back to take your phone. “Roxy, tell me you have your net open?”

“My… ohhhh. Shit, right. I dunno. Probably. Somewhere. Look, J, we are A) in the middle of Asstown New York in a fuckin’ forest no one knows exists. If drones do come out here, they ain’t finding the house.”

“And…? Was there supposed to be a point B?”

“I… yeah I didn’t think that through. Oh wait, fuck, no there is! B) I have enough rifle power to set this whole freakin’ forest on fire, I can defend the fort long enough for Jake to get here.”

“It will… _would_ take him at least three hours to fly over, Roxy.”

“James. Did I fucking stutter.”

Dad sighs. “Just… try to get your net open.”

“Will do. Rose, take your friend back. Why is the screen so _sticky?_ God damn I gotta take a shower after that…” There’s a thump and the sound of the phone roughly changing hands again, and then Rose saying something that gets cut off by static but you can tell it was something snarky and sharp.

“So… Dad… what’s a safety net? And why don’t we have one?” Thunder cracks again, and you start, but you manage to take the phone Dad hands back.

“We did have one. It fell through.” Dad scrubs a hand through his hair. “A safety net is a safehouse, basically. Jade and her grandfather have tunnels under their island. Rose and her mother have… something, she never told us. Dave and Dirk use the crowds in Houston as their safety net, to hide in plain sight, but… so did you and I, and that didn’t work in the end.”

You recall the mushroom cloud over your childhood home and silently agree.

Rose is quiet.

It’s gonna be a long thirty hours.

~

By midnight, none of you are really talking – just picking up and hanging up in near-dead silence – and you’re so drained that Dad has to remind you which call you’re on every ten minutes. Finally, right around the time you hit Boise, Dad takes your phone away and tells you to get some sleep.

You do stretch out in the back and close your eyes, but everything flashing through your mind keeps you agonizingly awake, no matter how heavy your eyelids feel. You stare at the roof and listen to the pattering rain that’s been on and off for the last seven hours. Then you hear Dad’s voice, low and barely audible over the hum of the tires and the spitting rain.

“I think he is, yes. Is Dave asleep too?”

A beat of silence. You shut your eyes and try to regulate your breathing.

“I know, Dirk. I wish I had… Nothing, yet. I told him and Jade both that we… that we angered someone powerful a long time ago. …It’s not _technically_ untrue.”

Another beat of silence. “I will. No, I _will._ I just…” Dad sighs, and you risk a peek to see him reach up and rub his eyes. “I don’t want to try and tell him alone. I’ll wait until you’re here. It’s a lot to try and explain on my own.”

You hear Dirk laugh, thin and staticky behind the rain, and then he says something you don’t quite catch.

“No, I think she wants them _all_ back.” Dad’s voice sinks even quieter. “We stole her most treasured possessions. Of course she wants them all back.”

Dirk says something and they both go silent. Your brain is starting to go haywire again, but the heaviness in your eyelids finally wins out. You drop off to sleep to the sound of pattering rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic now has [cover art](http://clitclip.tumblr.com/post/137920728284/happy-happy-birthday-i-was-very-lazy-with-this) by the fantastically talented [pinkdiamondprince](http://pinkdiamondprince.tumblr.com/) (aka Luneth)!!!!


	2. EDGING DOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nobody told you a cross-country drive for your life would be so...
> 
> ...boring.

By the time you wake up, the dashboard clock says it’s almost noon, and your first idiotic thought is _holy shit I missed the bus so hard._

Your second idiotic thought is _why am I sleeping in the back of a car?_

Reality finally catches up with your sluggish brain and you hit yourself in the face. The motion tugs at your barely-mobile muscles in all the worst ways and you groan again, vowing never to sleep in a backseat again.

Dad glances back at you, almost unrecognizable with a five o’ clock shadow. “Rise and shine.”

You drag a hand down your face, feeling like a zombie. “Okay, don’t freak out, but I think I missed the bus today.”

He laughs at that – genuinely laughs – and so does the phone in his hand, now plugged into the charger. You recognize the cackle. “Hi, Mrs. Lalonde.”

“Aw fuck no, honey. You call me Roxy. Or Mom. Honestly I answer to both.”

“Don’t swear at my son,” Dad admonishes. “It’s rude and childish.”

“Hoo boy. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been called rude and childish, I’d almost have enough to buy a fuck to give.”

You snicker and sit up, stretching your cramped muscles with a grimace. “Where are we?”

“Cortez, Colorado.”

You note the looming rock faces slipping past the window as your fly down the highway. “Huh,” you manage, and still running on half-asleep autopilot, you check your pockets for your phone. It takes you a solid twenty seconds of fumbling before you remember it’s in Dad’s hand. You resist the urge to facepalm again, and dig out your laptop.

Cerebrally, you _know_ the world hasn’t ended for everyone else, and it’s basically just going to be business as usual for everyone but you. But that doesn’t make it any less surreal to scroll through website after website of the same old mundane junk. Someone in politics made a controversial speech; global warming is still a Thing To Be Worried About; there’s a new meme going around flooding social media like a virus; a company just bought a medical research…

What?

You scroll back up and look at the article.

**[Renowned food-science giant CrockerCorp (formerly known as Betty Crocker) is taking business in a brand-new direction. The addition of floundering medical research lab Prospit Medcore to the company’s expanding interests has gained attention – and not all of it positive. Critics say that CrockerCorp is showing signs of becoming a dangerous monopoly, and should stay out of the healthcare industry entirely, but company representative Jack Noir assures critics that CrockerCorp is continuing their lifelong business of food science and safety, and Prospit Medcore will be used to that end…]**

You space out for a bit, wondering. You remember the link Dave sent you yesterday. What the hell does Betty Crocker have to do with anything? They’re just a company, you know, but there’s a prickle at the back of your neck saying _this is important._

Then there’s a prickle elsewhere that reminds you that you haven’t peed since yesterday and oh wow, this is about to become a crisis.

~

You only get three minutes at the gas station to run inside and do your business while Dad fills up the tank. The attendant gives him a dirty look when he doesn’t hang up the phone, but stays put – you get the impression he doesn’t get paid enough to care.

Within that three minutes, you’re back on the road like there’d been no interruption. Dad is on the phone with Dirk again, assuring him that _yes,_ he’s done the math, and _yes,_ it’ll only be about sixteen more hours, give or take; either way, _yes_ they’ll be there early tomorrow morning so just _be ready,_ Dirk, that’s all.

There’s an email from your school, asking about your absence today. You delete it without a second thought.

You continue to dick around on your laptop while the hours tick by. Around 2, Dad has you open one of the duffel bags he’d brought; it’s filled with nonperishable food, cans and dried fruit and packs of jerky. You realize how long it’s been since you last ate, and almost start tearing into it, but Dad warns you that this bag has to last both of you plus the Striders later, so you’ll have to ration it carefully.

Around 6, the sun is setting behind you and you halfheartedly offer to drive for a while, because Dad’s been driving for well over 24 hours now with no rest, but he firmly shuts you down. “For one thing, you’re thirteen and can’t drive in any sense of the word. For another,” he overrides your _but how hard can it really be_ , “I can let Dirk drive once we’ve all gotten out of Houston. This is nothing compared to some all-nighters we used to pull.”

With little else to do to kill time, you follow the thread of CrockerCorp online. You make a point to avoid the messed-up conspiracy site Dave sent you to yesterday, but everywhere else is fair game. When you glance over their official company website, it looks… well, perfectly generic, sleek and professional and full of sans-serif buzzwords like “innovation” and “expansion.” They have their Twitter feed embedded in a sidebar, announcing a big rebranding coming soon, but that’s not particularly shady – they’ve made it a huge marketing campaign, which you’re very familiar with thanks to Dad’s job. Besides, they’re expanding; rebranding is something all companies do when they expand, right?

Pesterchum _pop_ s, and you click it without thinking. There’s a moment of _fuck I fucked up_ before you see it’s just Dave sending you another link. The URL says it’s a news site, but you’re still cautious as you open it.

**[Mystery Explosion Causes Neighborhood Evacuation]**

And… yep, that’s a photo of your house. Granted, it’s mostly a heap of smoldering rubble, but that is definitely your house.

**[What appears to be a gas leak sparked an explosion in a Maple Valley neighborhood last night, causing a panic and later, an evacuation of the entire suburb. One house was destroyed entirely, and minor damage to several others has been reported. There are no confirmed injuries or fatalities, but the residents of the destroyed house have been unreachable for authorities. Neighbors are stunned. “It’s terrifying,” says one resident, who asked to remain nameless. “The city needs to do its job. There’re kids in this neighborhood. There was a kid in that house, even. This can’t be allowed to happen.”]**

“Huh,” you say, getting Dad’s attention. You wave at your computer screen. “We got a news article. Well, our house did, anyway. Local front page.”

“We did, huh?”

“Yeah. Photos look sick. They’re saying it was maybe a gas line leak.”

“Anything about us?”

“No names. Just, uhh…” you scan the article again, “‘residents of the destroyed house.’ Someone mentioned a kid living there, the authorities can’t get in touch with the homeowners, that’s about it.”

A gruff voice from the phone prompts Dad to relay the story to Jade’s granddad, and you go back to spacing out online. You shoot a reply back at Dave (“hey thanks, idiot, they called me a kid!”) and forward the link to Rose and Jade. Since your guardians are all still commandeering the phone lines, you help Jade set up a Pesterchum chat room for the four of you.

\-- ectoBiologist joined the chat room I Came Out Of Space Because You Need To Stop --

EB: okay, i’m here!  
GG: hang on, daves still connecting  
TT: How bad can his wifi possibly be?  
TT: Out of all of us, he’s the closest to civilization.  
EB: i don’t know, but he’d better bring his own laptop when he gets in here because i am not going to share!

\-- turntechGodhead joined the chat room I Came Out Of Space Because You Need To Stop --

TG: whoa hey there egbert i am hella wounded  
TG: what do you take me for  
EB: well as we all know, texas is an absolute technological wasteland!  
GG: yup, ive heard that too!  
EB: i bet he still uses internet explorer.  
TG: you take that back motherfucker  
TG: im gonna hold every fart in for the next eight hours  
TG: just so i can unleash hell in your car  
TG: you piece of shit  
EB: wow, i think this internet caveman is trying to communicate.  
TT: His syntax and punctuation could use some work, honestly.  
GG: rose!! leave him alone! hes banging rocks on the keyboard just trying to communicate!  
GG: you shouldnt discourage intercultural learning!  
TG: im going to kick all of your asses  
EB: okay, but for real dave, i just passed a road sign for wichita falls.  
TG: oh shit really  
EB: yeah, and i put it into the map thing and it says we’re about five hours away from houston.  
EB: maybe less, if dad keeps driving like a maniac.  
EB: personally i’m surprised we haven’t been pulled over yet!  
GG: well, grandpa is tracking police movements on that interstate  
GG: maybe hes sending your dad alerts?  
TG: jesus harley  
GG: what?? :O  
TG: just  
TG: your granddad  
TT: Your assessment of his secret identity might be correct after all.  
TT: It seems your grandfather is indeed Iron Man.  
GG: i knew it!!  
TT: In fact, the mor  
EB: uhhhh…  
EB: hit the enter button too soon?  
GG: rose?  
TG: shit shit fuck shit  
EB: what???  
TG: her mom just yelled something and hung up on bro  
TG: we got a fuckin problem

Your stomach plummets and you relay the information to Dad. He nods gravely, and the number on the speedometer ticks higher.

None of you talk about it, but you stare at tentacleTherapist’s idle icon restlessly.

You get to Houston in two hours instead of five.


	3. STAY DOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So far, you're not a big fan of Texas.

Your phone is in your pocket, hot from overuse, for the first time in almost two days. It bumps your leg as you climb the apartment stairs. It’s the dead of night – three in the morning – and your shoes clang abnormally loud against the steps in the silence. You pause at a window in the stairwell, both to catch your breath (holy _hell_ your legs are burning) and to try and get a glimpse of Dad’s car idling at a street corner.

The plan is, in your opinion, overly complicated and unnecessary, but you get the idea that Dave’s bro is kind of paranoid, and the stretch of radio silence from the Lalondes has done nothing to ease anyone’s nerves, so Unnecessarily Convoluted Plan it is.

You reach the top floor out of breath and shaky-legged. There’s only two doors here at the top of the stairs: one labelled “ROOF ACCESS” and the other unmarked. You knock at the unmarked door, exactly four times, and wait.

There’s a rustle, a scrape, and a beat of silence. “Who is it?” a familiar deep voice asks.

You roll your eyes – it’s not like he can see you anyway – and say, “Wayward Vagabond looking for Authority Regulator.”

Dave’s muffled voice drifts out. “Dude, for fuck’s sake, it’s _John_ , can you _put the sword down_ oh my _God_ you’re embarrassing.”

 _Thunk, thump, squeeeeal, thunk, clatter, ow fuck._ The door jerks open.

“Okay, Y’all two go get in the car. Go fast, go quiet. I’m right behind you, but I gotta get the rest of our shit. Go.” Dirk vanishes back into the pitch-black apartment, leaving you on the landing with Dave.

“If you bring Lil Cal, I swear I will jump out of Mr. Egbert’s moving car,” Dave stage-whispers after him, but gets no response. You grab his wrist and pull him back to the stairs. You’re feeling jumpy after thirty hours in the car, and you’re saving the touching I’m-meeting-my-best-friend-for-the-first-time moment for when you’re both back to the relative safety of Dad’s backseat.

On second thought, you might be getting kind of paranoid, too.

“Dude. John. Chill. _John._ ” Dave lets you drag him down a few steps before he pulls his arm from your grip and grabs your shoulders, turning you to face him. “Relax, okay? It’s the middle of the night.”

You jerk away from him. “Dave, no, okay, look. My dad was telling me… here, walk while we talk. He was talking about safety nets, you know, safeguards for if we get found? The Harleys have some kinda tunnels under the island they can hide in, Dad and I hid in the suburbs. You and Dirk’s net thing, he said it’s the crowd. It’s three in the morning, there isn’t a crowd to hide in.”

Dave ambles down the stairs behind you. “Yeah, I get that, but… okay, just, _trust_ me. It’ll be okay for now.”

You roll your eyes and don’t slow down.

Dirk catches up to you somewhere on the lower floors, a backpack in each hand and what looks to be a literal katana strapped to his back. He wordlessly shepherds you and Dave faster down the stairs, and you can feel the tension rolling off him in waves from his hand on your shoulder. You can’t imagine how Dave has managed to share a tiny apartment with him for the last thirty-odd hours.

By the time you hit the lobby, your legs are noodles of pain, but Dirk pushes you both out the door and into the cool dark, refusing to let either of you fall behind. On the street corner, Dad flicks the headlights on.

Dave isn’t beside you.

Dirk’s hand vanishes from your shoulder. You spin in confusion, half-expecting them to be locked in hushed conversation.

Instead, you see Dave half-collapsed on the pavement, one hand pressed to his temple, the other groping blindly in Dirk’s direction. A choked sound bubbles from his lips.

You stare, stunned. “Dave? Shit, are you okay?”

Dirk grabs Dave’s hands, prying them away from his face. “Dave. Hey. Look at me… Dave, what are you seeing? Dave! _Fuck._ ” He half picks Dave up. Dave is sort of mumbling words you can’t hear. “John. Car, go, now. C’mon.”

You jerk into motion, sprinting across the empty street, jumping in the backseat and leaving the door open behind you.

“What’s going on?” Dad is saying before you’re even fully inside. “What’s wrong with Dave?”

“I don’t know,” you snap a little harsher than you meant to. Dirk appears, shoving a stumbling Dave in the backseat beside you and vaulting into the front passenger seat, slamming the door.

“Drive,” he says quietly, but with a brittle edge of panic that sets your heart pounding harder.

Dad drives. “Is Dave…”

“He’ll be fine. It happens. Hey!” Dirk turns and snaps his fingers in Dave’s face. “Dave. Tune in, little man.”

Dave shifts and slurs something that sounds suspiciously like “they’re here.”

“ _Shit,_ ” Dirk growls. “James, I think the drones have mobilized, we need to—”

All the street lights go out.

“Damn it,” Dad says.

The coffeeshop on your left explodes.

Dad swerves away from the shockwave as Dirk dives into the back, shoving both your and Dave’s heads down as a barrage of broken glass and pulverized brick slam into the side of the car. A chunk of concrete crashes into your window; but it falls away leaving only a hairline crack. The rattle of flying glass shards fades away as Dad speeds towards the faint light of civilization downtown. “Stay down!” he shouts at you, but even if you wanted to, Dirk’s iron grip keeps you pinned at eye level with the door handle.

At your side, Dave is moving, pushing against Dirk’s hand. “Bro… wh’ the… _move_ , what’s…”

“Stay down. I said… Dave, stay the fuck down!”

There’s a flash of light from somewhere above and behind you. An instant later, there’s an enormous crashing _crack_ from up ahead, something bangs against the car from a direction you can’t see – the car swerves and fishtails.

Dirk’s hand slips from your head.

Almost against your conscious will, you turn and look out the back window.

“John, get down!” Dad is shouting.

Four massive, hulking shapes – so dark you can only tell where they are by where they silhouette against the clouds, crowding the sky, crammed into the space between high-rises. You can’t see them distinctly, but the spikes jutting into the overcast sky leave no doubt.

One of them is glowing even as you look, a vicious magenta glow that glares off the rims of your glasses. It’s powering up. You don’t know how you know that.

The glow turns into a searing flash.

You throw your hands up, to ward off the blinding glare, to protect your face from flying glass or fire or something worse…

A harsh, stormy gust of wind shoves the car off course, and catches the drones’ wings, sending all four of them slamming into a storefront. Less than a second later, a ball of fuchsia light and flame explodes outward, deafening and blinding. The shockwave sends the car skidding sideways, jumping the curb and taking out a bike rack before Dad gets it under control again and rounds a corner.

You reach the lights of a sleepy-but-not-deserted shopping square as the sounds of sirens – real, honest-to-God police sirens – vanish behind you. The drones have not reappeared. The air is uneasy, blowing gusts in fits and starts. Dave is panting for breath, and shoots you a what-the-hell-just-happened look. All you can do is shrug.

“I think they quit,” Dirk finally says, far too calm for the situation. “Or they fried. James, let me drive. I’ll get us back on the freeway.”

Dad sighs and puts the car in park. While he switches places with Dirk, you examine the crack in your window and look at the sky. The clouds hang heavy, stirred by the restless wind. It looks like it might rain again. Dad said something about drones being unable to fly in rain – you guess you can see why. You feel a little less terrified, but the pounding in your chest isn’t going away. It’s actually kind of getting louder, echoing in your ears…

“John.” That’s Dave’s voice. You open your eyes. When did you close them? “John. You’re bleeding.” You blink, trying to process that. Bleeding? All the flying debris missed you, right?

Dave’s voice is talking again, far off, too fast for you to follow. Your eyes jerk open again. You should stop closing them… There’s Dad, looking in your eyes, saying your name way too loudly, over and over. You want to answer – you try, but blood drips into your mouth when you do. Dirk is yelling somewhere, very distantly.

Black spots swim in your vision, so you shut your eyes again; but that sends the panic in Dad’s voice up a notch, so you struggle to keep them open.

Dad is replaced by Dirk, who presses something harshly against your nose, ignoring your gasp of pain, and pushes your shoulders until you’re lying on your side. The black spots dissipate, and the muffled hum of voice drifts back into focus.

“…calm down, James, it’s just burnout. Happens to Dave all the damn time. Just let him rest.”

“Dirk, my son is bleeding.”

“Yeah, and it’ll stop in a second.” The pressure on your nose eases, then disappears entirely. “See? It’s done already. I’m gonna get us back on the freeway. Dave, jump up front.”

A moment later, the car lurches into motion. You let your eyes drift shut again. Dad’s hand runs through your hair once, and then carefully lifts your glasses off your face. You hear Dave quietly ask: “What the hell just happened?”

“Let John sleep,” Dirk says. “We’ll explain shit when he wakes up.”

You take that as permission to pass the fuck out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it wasnt even 2k words im sorry


	4. THE LOWDOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time to straighten shit out.

“It basically all started with Betty Crocker,” Dirk starts, and is immediately interrupted by Dave’s “I fuckin’ _called_ it!” Dirk glares over his shades until Dave shrinks back into his seat. “…Anyway. So all four of us used to work the same department in the BC head office. That’s how we all met.”

“Pffff, _you_ used to work in _corporate?_ ”

“Okay, you little shit, A) it was an internship, and B) they had company childcare, and _my_ broke ass was trying to raise _your_ dumb ass, so pipe the fuck down.” Dirk rubs his eyes. “We were in… fuckin’ Finances, had to go through most of the company expenses and shit to file them out to the other offices.”

Dad picks up. “We found some questionable expenditures about two months in. Millions of dollars were being shelled out to a very vague ‘Research’ department. When we asked for more detail, they told us to stop worrying and file it. Jake pushed for more information… they got threatening. We collectively took some offense to that; so Roxy hacked into the company servers to see where the money was going. We were initially thinking, of course, it was something like… tax fraud, money laundering, something like that.”

Dirk huffs a humorless laugh. “Oh, if only. We thought it was in goddamn _code,_ or something, at first… it just didn’t make any sense. Crazy shit. Undersea excavating, medical experimenting… Telekinesis, telepathy, precognition, neural fuckery about supernatural powers. There were reports in there that rewrote _string theory._ We tried breaking the code… We only realized it _wasn’t_ a code when we found out what they were testing their shit _on.”_

Silence falls. You fidget, wanting to ask but afraid of the answers.

Dave asks for you. “So what were they using?”

“Children,” Dad answers. “They tried using volunteer adults, at first, but the results were too volatile, too uncontrolled. She started using street kids, foster kids, children no one would miss, and she would… expose them to something. All the reports just called it ‘the source of psionic power.’ None of them said what it was, or where it came from.”

“It worked,” Dirk growls. “Unfortunately.”

“It did.” Dad’s hand tightens on your shoulder. “Every child had a… different neural setup, a different brain, and none of them were finished developing, so… apparently they molded very well to the psionic power. Every child expressed a different, unique ability. The problem was, they were still too old. They were about twelve or thirteen in the first batch she tested. They all burned out. Overdid their powers – or were pushed over their limit, more likely – and ended up brain-damaged or dead.”

“What did you do when you found out?” you ask, struggling to keep your voice steady.

Dirk gripped the steering wheel tight and chewed at his lip. “Well… Nothing. Not at first. Jake wanted to take all the evidence straight to the CIA, but… Roxy pointed out, you know, what if they didn’t care? Or they thought this whole testing thing was a great idea, and said hey, cool, paranormal psychic powers, sign us the fuck up, here have some funding, carry on.”

“We stayed quiet,” Dad cuts Dirk’s rambling short, “to gather more information. It lasted about a month. We intercepted all their reports and copied it all down for later, and then we caught the last report…” Dad looks to Dirk, almost pleadingly, but Dirk fixes his eyes on the road and pretends not to notice. Dad takes a deep breath. “They called it the Second Zodiac project. Those first few kids, the ones that burned out… they were the first, the ones that showed the most promise but were just too old to adapt. With the Second… they were using much, much younger children.”

Your skin crawls, and you have a prickling feeling you know what’s coming.

“They pulled toddlers from the company nursery,” Dirk bites out. “They’d already started exposing them in there. Two floors below our office.”

It hits you like a punch to the stomach. From the look on Dave’s face, it hits him too. “So…” Your voice comes out like a croak. You try to clear it and start again. “So what happened to me back there… you called it burnout, that was—”

“Psionic burnout, yeah. We’re lucky it wasn’t worse, you could’ve died. You, Dave, Jade, and Rose, you were all in that nursery. They tested on you, exposed all of you to at least low-level psionics. We broke you out before they isolated you, but… we don’t really know how to reverse what they did to your brain.”

Dave laughs once, like a bark. “So, okay, let me get this straight, Betty Crocker is using killer robots to hunt us down, because when we were toddlers she tried to give us superpowers?”

“More or less, yeah.”

“But…” Your voice comes out too loud, too fast, “I didn’t even do anything! Why would I be burning out? I don’t have superpowers!”

“Yes you do,” Dad says, and you fall silent. “Back there with the drones, that gust of wind that knocked them off course… that was you.”

A vivid flash of magenta, you threw your hands up in defense…

“Is that why I see stuff sometimes?” Dave asks, subdued, rubbing his eyes beneath his shades.

“Pretty much. ‘S why I keep Cal around. You hated him as a kid. Pulls you right out of it. If you start getting fucked-up levels of precognitive, I get Cal. Keeps your burnout from getting too bad.”

“Wh… you weren’t just fucking with my head?”

“Well, I mean, yeah that too.”

You interrupt their banter. “Okay, wait, hang on. So if I have… like, accidental windy powers or whatever, and Dave… I think you’re saying he can see the future?”

“Sorta. Bits and pieces, under the right circumstances.”

“Okay, so what about Rose and Jade? You said everyone’s different.”

Dad runs a hand through his hair. “Jade is some form of telekinetic. She doesn’t know it yet. Jake blames any slipups on that crazy radioactive dog of his, and disguises her burnouts as narcolepsy. Plus, the island keeps them isolated, just in case.”

“And fuck knows what’s up with Rose,” Dirk mumbles not quite under his breath, then at normal volume: “She’s just weird. Roxy says she’s slightly precognitive, but inaccurately… And she’s interested in the occult, but c’mon, she’s _thirteen,_ that’s what girls _do_ at that age.”

You glance at Dad, but he’s resolutely watching the Tennessee landscape flash by. “I hope they’re okay,” you think out loud.

“Jake said he was tryin’ to get a satellite feed on their house, but most of the feeds he found were blacked out over New York. Looks like the old hag is starting her little ‘rebranding’ earlier than planned.” Dirk swerves around a slower car in his lane.

“ _Jesus,_ Dirk. Take it down a notch.”

“They’re _slow._ Got no damn business being in the left lane.”

“Okay, back up, let me think about this?” Dave pinches the bridge of his nose. “So Betty Crocker is trying to take over the world with mutant superpowered orphan teenagers, killer robots, and baked goods, so we’re going into hiding so she doesn’t find us and force us into her army?”

“Right so far, yeah.”

“All right, so my question is… like, what the hell are we gonna do afterwards? Are we going to blow the whistle? Fight her? Shit, I dunno, liberate the orphans? Flex the superpower muscles…”

“ _No_ ,” Dirk snaps.

Dave goes very still.

“See, okay, our goal here isn’t any of that shit! Should we have done something about CrockerCorp sooner? Probab-fucking-ly! Are we bad people for not telling y’all this sooner? Absolutely! And are we going to do jack shit about it now? No fucking _way._ What we _are_ going to do is put your asses somewhere safe, _keep you there,_ and what we do after that is our damn business and we’ll figure it out then.”

“They have Rose _right now!_ ” Dave shouts.

“And if we can get her back, we will!” Dirk yells right back. “That’s why we’re still driving to New York right this fucking instant, you shit! But when we get there, if there’s nothing but rubble and smoke, then you two are going to sit on Jade’s island and _fucking wait_ —”

“Fuck you! I’m not going to sit and wait like a princess, you asshole!”

“You will if I goddamn tell you to, you little—”

“Knock it off!” Dad shouts. “Both of you!”

They shut up.

“We can decide what to do once we get to New York. Until then, there’s no use speculating. We can get Jake to come pick us up, and at the very least we can regroup and re-arm back at the island while we make a plan.”

Silence falls in his authoritative wake. Dirk’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel, but his face is impassive. To escape the tense atmosphere, you dig your laptop out of your backpack where it was wedged against Nanna’s urn.

There’s a bobbing Pesterchum notification waiting for you.

…From Rose.

TT: I miss Frigglish.  
TT: Quite a bit, honestly.  
TT: Sometimes he’d sleep in my bed.  
TT: I miss him being around.

Your first instinct is to bang out a reply, but you delete your “rose where are you and are you okay” before you hit Send. The messages are dated around 5 AM this morning – well after your little psionic adventure, and definitely after all the Lalonde communication lines went down.

“I have something from Rose,” you announce to the silent car, and the lingering tension evaporates instantly.

“What?”

“What does it say?”

“Is she all right?” Dad leans over to look at your screen. You turn it towards him. “It’s…” you fumble, “it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t even know who Frigglish _is_.”

“Frigglish?” Dirk’s shaded eyes flash up to meet yours in the rearview. “Two g’s, right?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s what Roxy called their cat. Rose thought the name was stupid, she called him Jaspers.”

“But… okay, if Rose hated the name, why’d she use it?”

Dave puts his face in his hands and sighs. “John, you dipshit, it’s code. It’s so _obviously_ code, it couldn’t _be_ more code if it was written in goddamn _binary_ like that spambot that hassles Jade. Get your shit together, dude.”

Well… okay, you admit you should’ve thought of that.

Dad inspects the short messages for a few more minutes. You jump when your phone hums in your pocket, and almost hit yourself in the face trying to get it out, but it’s just Jade’s number. You pick up and put it on speakerphone. “Hey.”

“Am I on speaker?” says a rough, deep English voice you assume belongs to Grandpa Harley.

“Yes,” says Dad.

“I have satellite feed over New York,” he says grimly. “Loads of drone activity, under pretense of emergency disaster drills and… ‘testing new law enforcement.’ Drones were legalized as such yesterday, which means they won’t be doing this fly-by-night malarkey anymore. Be careful, boys.”

“Anything over the Lalonde house?” Dirk asks over his shoulder.

“I’m still fighting with the satellite camera. Google software is just so blasted _finicky_. Hang on a tick.”

Dad finishes scribbling Rose’s messages down on the back of a gas station receipt, and hands back your laptop. “She hasn’t taken Google down yet, then?”

“Not yet, but it’s just a matter of time. She bought out NASA last week.”

“What the hell does she want with space?” Dirk snorts.

“Well, she’s already got… _no,_ Becquerel, get _down…_ She’s already got half the planet in her clutches as it is, even if they don’t know it quite yet. Maybe she wants a little bigger of an empire. This all started with her oceanic exploration, anyway.”

Your laptop goes to sleep. You sigh in exasperation and re-type your password; when you glance back up, Dad is looking at you thoughtfully. “Jake, can you run an IP sweep?”

“In a minute. Why?”

“Rose sent a coded message to John early this morning. She wouldn’t have done so if she or Roxy didn’t think that someone could be watching.”

Your skin prickles. “Watching?”

At your question, Dad turns and looks you straight in the eye. “John. Back home, you said you thought someone had been on your computer. Why?”

“Uh… because…” It’s a struggle rewinding your brain through the last few days. “Because it was on, and unlocked, and—” It finally occurs to you. “It hadn’t even gone to sleep yet. Does, okay wait, does that mean, _are you saying_ there was someone _in my fucking room_ like, five minutes before I got home?!”

“It’s possible. Jake, IP sweep, how are we doing?”

“Still handling the satellite, James. I’ll have Jade do it… Jade, come over here.”

You shut your laptop, feeling sick for reasons you can’t quite articulate. There’s something you’re missing, something you’re forgetting, and the laptop’s innocent screen is nagging you about it. It’s been nagging you for days now, ever since…

It hits you like a bolt of lightning.

_The face._

The thing on your monitor grinning out with stretched pink lips, blank eyes staring out of a gray screen, gray _skin,_ blinking and vanishing before you could so much as move.

How did you forget? How could be such an idiot?

Your face must give something away, because Dave asks you what’s wrong.

Your mouth is dry. “The… when we left, I went to go get my stuff, there was a… something on the screen, looking out, it was only there for like a second, but…”

“What was it?” Dad’s voice is level, calm, but he’s not looking at you, he’s looking at the laptop on the seat between you like it’s a snake about to bite.

“A… face, I think.”

“John, let me see your laptop.” Dirk reaches back, and you hand it over.

“What kind of face?” Dad presses. “Did you recognize it?” Up front, Dirk hands the laptop to Dave, giving him quiet instructions that don’t quite make it back to you.

“Sort of… gray? Didn’t really have a nose, sort of black… eyes, well, more like black and pink I guess… Dave what the—”

Dave unrolls his window and calmly tosses the laptop out onto the freeway.

The car is doing about 90. You don’t even hear it hit the ground.

You repress your first _Dave what the fuck_ urge as it dawns on you exactly how badly you might have fucked up. You open your mouth to say… you’re not even sure yet…

“Your IP sweep is done,” Jade says through the phone still in your hand. Her words are steady and calm, the Jade you’ve always known and trusted. In control. “I’m getting… duplicate results here. It’s the same address from like, three different places. One from the I-81, which I’m guessing is where you are; another from the backwoods in Canada – I have _no_ idea what’s going on there – and one in Minneapolis.”

“Can you get street addresses?”

“Mmmm, I can try, but Google Maps has been kind of glitchy. Grandpa, did we get video from th… what the hell is _that?_ ” The phone crackles with the sound of Jade moving very quickly. “Is that _fire?!_ ”

“Looks like it,” Jake says, his words muffled and distant. “Local is moving in on it, so it hasn’t been there long. Here, give me the phone.” When he speaks again, his voice is louder and clear. “Drones got there first. I’ll try to send screenshots, but they’ll be a tad grainy.”

A few photos come through. You tilt the screen to Dad. The pictures are kind of grainy, but you can see smoke and white concrete scattered over what looks like a forest floor.

“Any word on casualties?” Dirk asks.

“Nothing yet.”

Dad speaks. “Should we keep going to New York?”

“I’d say yes. If Rose can send a coded message, she’s likely not in Crocker’s hands yet. They may be hiding out in the woods.”

Something in your chest loosens. “So they’re not captured?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Thanks, Jacob. We’ll keep in touch, all right?”

“Anytime, James. Stay safe, call if you need us.” The line goes dead.

Nobody talks until you pass the New York state line.


	5. DIG DEEP DOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rainbow Falls, New York.
> 
> It's on fire, _again._

Rose’s house isn’t gone, exactly; it’s just _everywhere._

Rubble crunches under the car tires as Dad pulls in what’s left of the Lalondes’ dirt driveway. It’s about six in the morning, and faint sunlight drifts through the treetops. Dave is asleep on your shoulder, shades askew. You shove him awake as the car comes to a halt.

“Jake’s monitoring the drone orders,” Dirk says, unbuckling his seatbelt. “They’re not scheduled to come back here to clean up ‘til tomorrow, but I don’t want to take any chances. We get in, see what we can find, and get out again. You two, check the house. James, you and me check the woods.”

You wrestle with your own seatbelt. “What are we looking for?”

“Fuck if I know. Clues. Listen for yelling. Look for blood.”

“ _Dirk._ Jesus. Don’t tell them that.”

“Hey, I don’t want to find it either…”

Dirk and Dad drift off to the treeline, leaving you and Dave to wander through twisted steel and wreckage. Some of it is still smoldering in places, but you can’t smell gas and Dad doesn’t seem worried, so you skirt around the smoking piles. Rose’s house was built beside a small dam, and the rushing of the river puts you on edge. It sounds like whining engines.

“Do you think they’re okay?” you ask Dave after a minute.

He toes at what looks like part of a stair railing. “Probably. Rose is the kinda person who’ll just keep living out of sheer spite.”

“When Dad asked her about her safety net, Rose’s mom didn’t seem too sure.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe they got their shit together before the drones showed up.”

You’re about to say something to the effect of _but what if they didn’t_ when you step in something soft that tangles around your ankle, and you go down hard. “Ow _fuck._ ”

Dave drags you upright. “Shit. You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m… is this yarn?” You grab a handful of the thing you stepped in, and pull out several inches of soggy purple scarf. “I… Dave, look at this.”

“Yeah. Dude, it’s a scarf. Rose knits. Not a big surprise.”

“I think this is where her room was.” You drop the scarf with a wet splotch and turn over a slab of concrete with your shoe. “Here, help me look through this.”

Dave’s eyebrows are furrowed, but he helps you flip the concrete anyway. “What are we looking for? I think this was also the living room, just so you know. Or her room, like, fell _into_ the living room.”

“She said something about how her cat used to sleep in her bed.” The concrete slides off the pile of rubble with a dusty crash, kicking up a cloud of white dust. “Maybe there’s something in here.”

Dave sneezes. “Jeez. Okay, so… we’re looking for, what, escape hatch? Invisible ring of runes that deliver a message when offered the blood of virgins…?”

“I don’t _know,_ Dave! Why don’t _you_ chip in with your weird future powers?” You pause halfway through prying a shattered violin out of the wreckage. “And while we’re talking about it, how did you never know you _had_ weird future powers?”

He shrugs, sweeping aside a pile of broken glass you’d been about to put your hand in. “It’s not like I can decide _what_ to look at, dipshit. And, I dunno, it just… never came up? The stuff I’d see, it was always just, you know, regular shit. I’d come out of it wiped the fuck out, always figured it was just being tired from fightin’ on the roof all the damn time.”

A piece of rebar shocks you when you grab it. You jerk back and look around for something to lever it out of place. Dave offers you what looks to be a fireplace poker, then shoves his hands back in his pockets. “How about you? I mean, how do you go your entire life without noticing you have wind… stuff?”

You shrug and shove the rebar out of the way. “Never came up. Are you gonna help or just stand there?”

Dave finally climbs up the pile next to you and takes his hands out of his hoodie pocket long enough to help you shift a bookcase to the side. Underneath, you spot a waterlogged grimoire – the one Rose was writing herself, which she showed to you a few times over webcam. She was really proud of it, she’d developed her own system of runic grammar and glyphs to write it. You try to pick it up, but the cardboard cover tears away in your hand. “Shit.”

“Over here,” Dave says from the other side of a crumbled heap of drywall. “I think this is her bed.”

You leave the ruined grimoire where it is and clamber carefully over the rubble, which shifts dangerously under your shoes. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. I mean, I doubt Mom Lalonde had tentacle-print sheets, but I _could_ be wrong.”

The two of you dig around the splintered remains of Rose’s bedroom, but find nothing. You do notice that her knitting supplies are nowhere to be found, but in the ruins of such a big house, you doubt you’d find them anyway. After an hour, your hands are scraped and bloody around your nails, and you and Dave call a break. The sun is up for real now, and the early fall chill isn’t enough to keep either of you from breaking into a (frankly kind of gross) sweat from the exertion.

“Anything?” Dave yells across the wreckage. You look up to see Dad and Dirk picking their way over in your direction.

“Not yet,” Dad answers. The glare off Dirk’s shades makes his expression unreadable, but his mouth is set in a thin line. “How about you two?”

“Nope.” Dave waves a hand at your efforts. “We tried zeroing in on Rose’s room, ‘cause she said something about the cat sleeping in her bed, but… nothing.”

You kick at a chunk of PVC pipe and say nothing, watching it skip and skitter over the rubble.

“Well, I vote we get outta here,” Dirk says. “Wait and see if Rose sends anything else. They’ll realize we’re dumbasses and give us another clue if they can. If they don’t, we get to Jake’s island and—”

“What’s that?” you interrupt. You don’t mean to, but there’s a small stone structure almost out of sight beside the dam. It resembles an outhouse, but you can’t imagine why Rose’s mom would put so much effort into a huge, modern, steel-and-concrete home and then have an outhouse.

They all turn to follow your gaze.

“Huh,” says Dirk.

There’s a calm moment of silent agreement to not talk about _why the fuck didn’t we see that earlier_ before you all go investigate. You trail along after Dad, glancing up at the sky. It’s empty, sun shining brightly in earnest, but ever since that night with the drones, you’re starting to get antsy around clear skies.

“What the hell is this?” Dave asks. The stone structure is smaller than it looked – maybe the size of a phone booth. “Some kind of… fuse box thing?”

Dirk circles it curiously. “Doesn’t look like it connects to anything. No wiring.”

Dad glances inside. “I… wh… is that a _coffin?_ ”

You push in beside him. “A… coffin?” Sure enough, a tiny, two-foot-long coffin sits neatly on a pedestal in the middle. Carved around the ceiling is some Latin phrase you don’t understand. “What the hell?”

“Oh are you kidding me.” Dirk appears over your shoulder. “They entombed their cat. This is a goddamn mausoleum. The fucking drama in this family, I swear to God, I don’t know how they managed to get this far without snarking each other into the grave.”

“You’re… saying this is their cat’s tomb?” You look back at the coffin. It’s the right size, sure, but…

It hits you all at the same time.

“Frigglish,” Dave breathes. “Fuck me sideways. You don’t think…”

Dad is already kneeling to the dusty stone floor, feeling around the pedestal for seams. “Dirk, look for a keypad, something coded. John, come help me.”

You drop to your knees and start probing underneath the coffin. “What am I looking for?”

“A button, a switch… a hole, anything that doesn’t belong.” Dad brushes a few spider webs away.

You consider the small room carefully. You doubt there’s anything useful in the Latin inscription – Rose would’ve said something if it were important. “Something my mother always used to say to me in Latin before bed” or something. But she specifically talked about the cat…

Without thinking too hard about it, you reach over and wrench the lid off the coffin.

Instead of crunching wood, you hear a soft click and then a distant whirr of machinery.

Dirk appears back at the mausoleum door, Dave at his heels. “What the…”

The (noticeably empty) coffin slides down into the floor and off to the side, revealing a hatch ladder descending into dusty darkness.

Dirk goes first. He doesn’t really give any of you a choice, practically shoving Dad aside when he makes as if to start climbing down. You follow him, determined not to be last and also just generally very eager to see if Rose is down here.

You’re going to yell at her for leaving such a vague clue.

…No, you’re not. You’re going to hug her like the sappy sentimental dumbass you are.

Your shoes hit concrete, kicking up a puff of dust. Dirk is fumbling with something in the darkness next to you. Dave comes down after you, sneezing on the dust and blundering into you blindly. You shove him. “Dude, take off the shades, it is literally pitch black down here.”

“No way. This is my first time meeting Rose. How’s she gonna know it’s me if I don’t have the signature look?”

“Maybe she’ll smell your oedipal complex, and if she doesn’t, she’ll know the second you open your mouth and say something stupid. Take them off, you’re not going to hold my belt loops to find your way around down here. This isn’t kindergarten.”

“Someone’s pissed he didn’t get to be line leader.”

“Oh my god shut the hell up.”

Dad finally joins you, pulling out a penlight. It’s not much, but you can see a narrow hallway stretching out in front of you. You can’t see further than a few feet before the concrete floor vanishes in a veil of dusty air and darkness. “Dirk, do you want to take the lead? I’ll take rear.”

Dirk accepts the penlight. “James, you realize if it ain’t the Lalondes down here, it could be something nasty.”

“It _is_ the Lalondes. Who else would build a secret bunker under a cat’s grave? Just walk.”

Dirk shrugs. “Just sayin’, I don’t exactly have space to swing a sword here.”

“It’s fine,” Dave says suddenly in a soft monotone. You jump. He’s been so still, you almost forgot he was there. “I know. It’s them.”

Your skin prickles. _That’s_ going to take some getting used to.

With Dave’s assurance, the hallway doesn’t seem so sinister, and the narrow walls are less terrifyingly claustrophobic and more of an irritating hindrance to your progress. Every time you take half a step out of line, your shoulder scrapes rough concrete. The dust doesn’t help, either – you and Dave are constantly sneezing, which only serves to kick up more of the gritty stuff.

Eventually you lose track of time, but it’s been at least thirty minutes before the tunnel widens into a bubble-like room. Dirk steps to the side and lets you pass, turning to talk to Dad. The penlight turns with him, and you blink in the sudden darkness. You notice how gritty your glasses are, and slide them off to blow them clean.

“James, where the hell is this going?”

“Why would you expect me to know?” Dad sounds annoyed. “She talked to you far more than anyone else.”

Dirk snaps something that gets lost in the echoes, and you take a cautious step further into the darkness, slipping your glasses back on. You aren’t sure if the scuffling noises you hear are from Dave’s shoes or something else, but then something in the air _twists_ in a way you can’t describe, ghosting across your face like a silk thread and sending the hairs on the back of your neck standing up.

“Guys,” you say, but they don’t hear and you _can’t_ turn away from the gaping tunnel mouth in front of you because there is something _in there,_ twisting the air in split halves and sending the stale breeze flowing out like water, like tentacles…

Silent as a ghost, something emerges out of the dark.

“Dad.” They hear you, finally, and turn to look.

It’s Rose.

She leans heavily on the concrete wall, blinking through the dust and against the dark circles beneath her eyes. There’s a dark spot high on her cheek that could be a bruise or just a smudge of dirt, and her hair hangs in oily strings around her face.

You think you’ve never seen anyone so beautiful.

She pushes her headband into place with a knitting needle in her hand and smiles. “You found us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey I have a tumblr come yell at me about this fic http://clitclip.tumblr.com/
> 
> I track the tag #fic: DOWN and I will love you forever if you put anything in it


	6. DOWN THE TUBES

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You would _think_ that between four adults, four fairly well-adjusted teenagers, and one omnipotent demigod-dog, you'd all be able to stop making terrible decisions.

You watch very carefully, and not once does Rose’s mom let go of her rifle.

“Yeah, there were more than I thought there were gonna be,” she says conversationally, handing you a mug of tea. You watched her make it, and you’re still not a hundred percent sure how she did it one-handed. “Ran out of basic ammo in like, five minutes.”

“I _did_ tell you, Roxy.”

“Yeah, _James_ , ya did. Gold star. I will defer to you on all future counts of threat assessment except, oh wait, _backup lab._ ” She waves her free hand at the dusty equipment surrounding you.

Rose had led you back to this lab – or so she and her mom call it, but it strikes you as more of a bunker – where Roxy had swung around in a swivel chair to announce “Welcome to the Lalonde Lair” before the chair spun too far and carried her out of sight again. The bunker is about the size of your living room back home, with a door at the far end opposite the tunnel you came through. A huge blank screen takes up an entire wall, a four-foot-long keyboard stretching beneath it at waist height.

“Backup lab or not”—Dirk pauses to accept his own mug—“you still scared the shit out of us.”

“Pshhh, Rose sent you a note! Ain’t my fault you’re code-reading dumbasses. _Obviously_ we were okay.”

“Have you seen what happened out there?” Dirk waves a hand vaguely at the ceiling. “And Jake couldn’t get satellite on New York until it was _literally on fire,_ for like the _fourth time_ since you moved here, so what were we supposed to think?”

“Awww, frick, I gotta message Jake, huh.” Roxy slides back into her swivel chair and swings back around to the massive screen (computer? You aren’t sure what that thing is). “Does he still have transmissions shut down?”

“Most likely, yes.” Dad rubs his lengthening facial scruff. “Jade’s cell is the only tech he hasn’t shut off.”

“Huh. Rose, gimme your phone, I gotta call her.”

Rose hands her phone to her mom without a word. She’s sitting at a rickety folding table with you and Dave. None of you have said much. What would you say? “So Rose, what was it like watching your childhood home be brought to flaming ruins around you? Ha, I know how that feels.” Right, that’ll go over _great._

You chew your lip and tune out Roxy explaining her situation rapidly to Jade’s granddad. Casting a glance over at Dad, you wonder what it must have been like for him while you were growing up. He would’ve had to be on guard all the time, watching for drones, staying in contact with the others, watching you all the time to see how badly your brain was messed up and if you ever noticed…

Rose shoots you a glance you can’t decipher, and goes back to knitting quietly under the table. Her lips move soundlessly as she counts stitches.

“So.” Dave puts both elbows on the table and shoves his shades up on his head to rub at his eyes. “This is… shitty.”

You mumble a noise of agreement. Rose nods along, counting her stitches.

“I mean, I kind of figured something weird was up,” Dave jerks his head in Dirk’s direction, “thanks to living with _that_ paranoid fucker.”

“Watch your mouth,” Dirk says from across the room without looking up.

“I had an idea as well,” Rose says. Her needles pause. “I had dreams.”

“Dreams?” You blink at her.

She lifts up her knitting and inspects it. She doesn’t look at either of you. “Yes, John. _Dreams._ They happen when you sleep sometimes.” You can tell she’s trying for snark, but it doesn’t quite mask the exhaustion in her words. “There were… was a voice, talking in a language I couldn’t understand, but… I also kind of did? I told you about it, but I fear you may have mistaken it for – how did you put it, Dave? My ‘Lovecraftian emo bullshit.’”

Dave sighs and puts his face in his hands. “Rose, you’ve been in this bunker for like, two days or whatever and you’re _still wearing black lipstick._ You’re the goddamn Empress of Lovecraftian emo bullshit. Maybe if you’d, I dunno—”

“Wait.” You hold up a hand to shut Dave up. “You mean that grimoire you were writing, that was actually…”

Rose nods. “Transcriptions of things I heard in my dreams. At first, I just thought it happened to everyone, but when I was about ten I realized it was something important, so I tried creating a lexicon to translate. I never did, though.”

You suppress a snicker, despite the situation. Of course Rose would try to translate broodfester tongues. You wouldn’t expect anything less.

“So what’s your poison?” Dave asks.

Rose raises a slim blonde eyebrow at him.

“You know.” He waves a hand at her. “Your thing. Your shtick. Your… whatever.”

“Power,” you clarify. “He’s asking what’s the thing you can do.”

“Ah. Well, I’m… not even sure, really. The dream voice never told me, and I’ve never expressed anything beyond ‘inaccurate precognition,’ as Mom called it.” Rose picks up her knitting needles again.

“Didn’t your mom tell you what kind of shit went down when we were kids?”

“About psychic experimentation on toddlers? Yes, she did. We still don’t quite know what they did to me, though.” She knits slower now, trying to talk and count stitches at the same time. “What about you two?”

“I can see the future, John has wind powers or something.”

“Really?” She looks at you and drops her voice to a whisper. “Show me.”

You glance at Dad, but he apparently didn’t hear. “I… I don’t know if…”

“Hey, as long as you don’t start breaking shit, I don’t think they’ll care.” Dave slides his shades back into place and looks at you expectantly. “Go ahead, I want to see this. I wasn’t watching last time.”

You chew at your lip. “I… guys, I don’t really know how. I’ve done it like, once.”

“Well, try. Practice makes perfect.” Rose puts her knitting down again, watching you carefully. Her blonde eyelashes are almost invisible in the dust and shadow.

You look down at your hands, wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do. Do you just… push the air with your mind? Are you supposed to move your hands? You think back to the drones in Houston. What did you do then? You watched it power up, and put your hands up to stop it, but you were just trying to defend yourself. You didn’t _do_ anything.

You take a deep breath and close your eyes. The bunker’s air is stale and heavy with dust, so you try to imagine it like murky water. You hear Dave breathing beside you – well, not _hear_ it so much as _feel_ it. Air in twin currents, in and out, swirling the dust in eddies and flowing out into space. You feel Rose’s breath, too – shallow and steady, less like a current and more like a living creature, like twisting tentacles in the deep ocean. When she breathes out, it’s like an eel leaving a cave, sleek and smooth, leaving barely a swirl in its wake.

Dad and Dirk’s breath comes into your mental focus. And… there’s Mom Lalonde, her breathing coming in hums and pauses while she talks into the phone, her quiet words like, like… invisible handwriting, cutting patterns in the floating dust motes, sending them swirling, bouncing off the low ceiling, drifting like smoke down the hallway you came in through.

And down that hallway you can feel the empty space, the narrow walls funneling air in strange, tight ways, stretching out of your sensory range into a dark vacuum, dark as outer space, dark as the bottom of the sea. The air hangs heavy and lethargic here underground.

You keep your eyes closed and stretch out your hand. Pretend that it’s water, like you’re swirling your hand over the side of a canoe. You sweep your hand through the space in front of you and feel the currents of air ghost over your skin.

Driven by impulse, you grab hold of a slipping current of air and _pull._

Rose gasps sharply. Your eyes fly open in time to see a knitting needle fly from her hand and clatter to the floor.

Mom Lalonde stops talking. Dad and Dirk jump at the noise and stare at the needle on the floor.

Dave is the only person in the room looking at you instead of the floor.

“Shit,” he says. “Bad idea.”

You’re about to ask what he means when a wave of dizziness washes over you. You grab the table for support as the room spins and something warm drips from your nose. “I… Dave?”

Dave has an iron grip on your shoulder. “No, okay, chill, you’re fine…”

“John?” Dad has your other shoulder. “What happened?”

You blink several times until the world stops tilting sideways, and have the presence of mind to swipe at your nose before any more blood drips out. “I’m not… I don’t know?”

Dave lets go of you. “Well damn, look at you bein’ upright all by yourself. See, you’re fine.”

With a shake of your head, the last of the dizziness fades, leaving you with a pounding headache and the taste of blood at the back of your throat, but it’s nowhere _near_ as bad as the last time. You swipe at your nose again, and there’s no fresh blood. “Am I… Dad, am I still bleeding?”

Dad examines your face, worry etched in every line around his eyes. “It… doesn’t look like it. What in God’s name just happened?”

You shoot an uneasy glance at Rose. “Uhhh… I kind of… tried…?” Your voice trails off.

“Tried…” Realization dawns in Dad’s face. “ _Jesus,_ John. Were you not listening earlier? Children _die_ using psionic power! What were you thinking?”

“I didn’t think that…”

“No, you _didn’t_ think. Christ, John. Don’t try that again.”

The shouting isn’t helping your headache, and you wince as your temples throb.

“James,” Roxy says from her place by the computer. “Yelling won’t help. _Shhh._ Inside voice.”

Dad sighs and lets go of you, returning to his own chair. “What’s the word on Jacob?”

Roxy puts the phone by her shoulder. “ _Shhhh._ He’s checking to see if he has a clear flight path. He’ll let me know when he’s good to leave.”

Dirk hasn’t moved from his chair. “Drones on the ocean?”

“Yeah, but he says that they’re transport drones. I doubt they’re lookin’ for the island.” She types a few keystrokes into the computer and then speaks into the phone at her ear. “Okay, Jake, hook me up.”

The wall screen lights up and comes alive with a world map. Slowly, red specks pop into existence, moving slowly over it. “Uh-huh. Okay. Can’t you cross-reference their commands to get a future flight path?” Roxy nods at Jake’s answer. “Shit. Okay, keep us posted.” She puts a hand over the microphone and turns to the rest of you. “Every red spot up there—” she nods at the screen, “—is a drone. Jake needs them mostly off the Pacific before he’ll risk a flight out. They still don’t know about the island, we wanna keep it that way.”

“We can’t stay here, though,” Dirk points out. “Drones are scheduled to clean up the rubble outside tomorrow. They’ll find us down here.”

Roxy points at the door set into the opposite side of the bunker. “That hallway comes out in the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere. Middle of the woods. If Jake can’t get here sooner, we’ll take the long way and make him meet us there. It’ll buy us a couple hours, at least. They can’t fit down here to see where it leads, so they’d either have to guesstimate – and Dirk, they’re _robots,_ they’re _shit_ at guesstimating – or call in backup.”

“So when do we call it?” Dad asks. “How long until we give up on Jake and move to the woods?”

“Mmm. Hard to say. Jake’s patched me in the drones’ feed.” She taps a series of keys, and a dialog box pops up on the screen, scrolling with code. “They all share the same network. From here, I can monitor the orders they receive. Once I see ‘em coming our way, we pack up and move.” She spins her chair in a lazy circle. “But that’s gonna be for-fuckin-ever and at least we have snacks in here, so I’m in no rush to be stuck in the woods. It’s September out there, James.”

Dad doesn’t comment.

You fidget in the chair, eyeing the screen as Roxy zooms into the United States northeast. There are a _lot_ of red spots moving around, but she doesn’t seem too worried. That being said, she still hasn’t set down her rifle.

~

According to your phone, it’s about four in the afternoon.

A few hours earlier, Rose claimed the only cot in the room for herself and has been sleeping soundly ever since. Dave is resting his head on his folded arms, shades lying nearby, apparently dozing off as well. Dad is, too – you don’t blame him. Of all of you, he’s probably gotten the least amount of sleep since all this started.

Roxy clicks through the endlessly scrolling list of drone orders, barrel of her rifle ever-present in her left hand.

Dirk is carefully cleaning his sword, picking at invisible bits of rust. Every so often, he looks up at the computer screen, but never says anything about what he sees.

You use your phone’s front camera to clean the flecks of dried blood off your face, but that doesn’t burn up much time. With little else to do, you’ve start just reading the codes flashing by on the screen, pretending they make sense to you. Rose’s mom seems to understand them though, which is comforting.

According to your phone, it’s about four in the afternoon.

You notice Dad look up in confusion. He’s not looking at you, though – he’s looking at where Rose is sleeping. “Roxy?” he says, in that calm and light way grownups do when there’s something serious happening that they don’t want you to ask too many questions about.

Roxy turns, sees Dad looking away, and follows his gaze. So do you.

Your eyes go wide and you shove Dave awake.

Rose is still asleep, her normally soft blonde hair now bone-white, drained of color and drifting around her face like sea kelp. Her skin has gone ashy gray and shadowed, inhuman.

And she’s levitating about six inches off the cot.

Roxy stands up. For the first time since you’ve met her, she sets her rifle down and leans it against the console. “Don’t wake her,” she whispers, barely loud enough to be heard over the computer’s humming. “Don’t touch her. She doesn’t… she doesn’t know this happens.”

You’re transfixed by Rose’s slowly drifting hair. The air in the bunker is silent and dead again, but her bangs sway and rise like she’s underwater. “What’s happening to her?” you ask as quiet as you dare.

Roxy doesn’t look away from Rose either. “Something’s trying to talk to her.”

“What?” Dirk is even quieter, hand limp around the hilt of his sword.

“Listen,” Roxy says. She stands up but doesn’t walk to her daughter.

You listen, and at the same time, Rose’s lips part.

 _“A ‘fhalma…”_ she whispers in something else’s voice. _“Vulgtlagln Gl’bgolyb… tharanak zhro… Nnn h’gof’nn, c’grahn… nog geb hai… ilyaa y’hrii…”_

Dave, red eyes wide and shades forgotten on the table, shoots you a bewildered look. You shake your head and shrug, looking to Dad for answers.

“What’s talking to her?” Dad whispers.

Roxy shrugs. “She only started doing this like a year ago. I haven’t had enough time to study it.”

With a soft _flump,_ Rose falls back onto the cot. Her skin returns to normal and she sleeps on, completely oblivious. Dirk and Dave trade a Look. “Okay,” Dirk says. “That was… deeply disturbing on a multitude of levels?”

“Lovecraftian emo bullshit,” Dave mumbles under his breath, picking up his shades and shoving them on his face.

“And you say she doesn’t know she does this in her sleep?” Dad presses.

Roxy shrugs and sits back down in her swivel chair. Her fingers close around her rifle barrel again. “Not that she’s told me, and I’d _like_ to think she would.”

“You say she’s inaccurately precognitive?” Dirk looks back at Rose’s sleeping figure.

Her mom nods. “First started when she was like, four. She’d be sitting quietly with a book, then just look out the window and say shit like, ‘Trees on fire’ or something, and of course _I’d_ freak the fuck out thinkin’ the forest was gonna be burning down again, but it never did. When she got older it got kinda hard to monitor ‘cause she doesn’t just word-vomit her internal monologue anymore, but I figured it out.”

“Maybe she’s seeing an alternate future?” Dirk points out. “Like, worst-case-scenario future.”

“I’ve thought about that too, yeah. Makes sense. Problem is, I can’t really test that without everything goin’ to shit, ya know?”

You think of Rose’s grimoire and wish you’d put more effort into picking it up and bringing it down here with you.

Rose’s cell phone jingles with a snippet of a Katy Perry song. (Jade’s ringtone – _for the ironies, of course,_ Rose claimed. Dave had never been prouder.) Roxy snatches it up before it can wake Rose. “Harley, tell me you got good news.”

Jade’s granddad’s voice crackles over the speaker. “I have a clear flight path. Minimal drone activity. I can be at our rendezvous by… eight o’ clock, in your time zone. It’ll be a bit dark, but I’ll manage a landing. Can you be there by then?”

“Two hours, max.” Roxy shuts down the computer. The entire wall goes black, and you blink in the sudden darkness. “Giant Mountain got any foot traffic?”

“None that I can tell. We can cook up a cover story if anyone tries to kick up a fuss.”

“Roger.” Roxy covers the mouthpiece and swivels back to face the room. “Get your panties on, kids, we’re moving out.” She turns back to the phone. “You bringing Jade?”

“No. She’s staying behind with Becquerel.” Jake’s answer is curt, and he seems to realize it, because after a beat of silence he adds, “If… if something does go wrong, God forbid, she can use the lab tech to help. And Bec can do his best to keep the drones at bay.”

“We get it, Jake. It’s cool. Did you tell her what’s going on?”

“Er… we had something of a coming-to-Jesus, yes.”

“A coming-to-who?” Roxy throws a pen at Dad and mouths _Get your shit together._

“She knows everything but the… abilities.”

Roxy sighs. “God damn it, Jake. You gotta tell her eventually.”

“I’ll leave that conversation until we get back safely, thanks. I’m warming up the chopper, be there when I arrive, please.”

“Will do. See you then.”

Dave is shaking Rose awake as you swing your backpack onto your shoulder. “Jade doesn’t know about psionics yet?” you ask.

Mom shrugs, unplugging a black box from the computer console. “Guess not. It doesn’t matter, we’ll bring her up to speed once we get to Isla de Harley.” She drops the box to the concrete floor and brings the butt of her rifle down on it hard. It sparks and fizzles, releasing a smell like ozone. She swings the rifle down again and it shatters, sending electronic guts everywhere. “Hard drive,” she explains. “I ain’t planning on coming back here.”

Rose swings upright, rubbing sleep from her eyes and smudging what’s left of her day-old eyeliner. “Are we leaving?”

“Yup. C’mon, we wanna be there before Jake. Six dumbasses with luggage are way less conspicuous than a helicopter.” Roxy hands Rose a backpack. “You’re in charge of this.”

“Am I ready for such responsibility?” Rose deadpans, but threads her arms through it anyway.

Roxy heaves open the bunker door and leads the way out. “Our rendezvous point is a hill up north,” she explains over her shoulder. “Giant Mountain. It’s kind of a tourist spot, so we won’t turn too many heads, and there’s a nice flat rock face for Jake to land.”

“Does he have enough fuel?” Dirk asks, falling into step behind you. Dave trails along after him, bringing up the rear. “I mean, I know he’s supposed to be a professional, but… you know him.”

“I’m sure his granddaughter has that covered,” Dad says, but he sounds uncertain.

You all walk in silence for a few minutes. You fix your gaze on the back of Dad’s head and let your mind wander. If you half-close your eyes, you realize, your mind automatically shifts to sense the air around you. You take a risk and close your eyes completely, letting the brush of moving dust and the currents of breath tell you where all the walls and people are.

It’s chaotic, at first – you can’t distinguish between which fluctuations in the air are from your own walking, and which are from Dad’s breathing or movement in front of you. It’s disorienting, and your eyes almost jerk back open to keep your balance, but you remind yourself: _Pretend it’s water. Imagine it’s water._

Your mental picture of the hallway around you rearranges in a way you can’t explain. Dirk’s breath ghosts at your hair, even though you can tell he’s at least three feet behind you; behind him you can feel Dave, running his fingers through his hair and disturbing the dust motes. You can feel Roxy leading you all, several feet ahead, leaving a swirling wake in the air, her breath like a steam engine rising above and behind her.

Rose’s is even and calm, and again you’re reminded of some sleek underwater creature in the way she breathes – you wonder if that’s a coincidence, given what you saw only a few minutes ago. When she walks, the air parts around her and closes after her shoes, leaving only the smallest eddies and twists in the air. It’s like magic, and you’re so caught up with it that you almost miss Dad turning around to say something. Your eyes fly open before he sees.

“Dirk,” he’s saying, “does Dave see us getting there safely?”

Dirk shrugs – you aren’t looking, but you feel the shifting pulse in the air as he does. “Dunno. Dave, can you…”

“I’m _trying,_ bro, chill.” Dave sounds irritated. “I’ve _been_ trying for like the last thirty fucking minutes, but it’s kinda hard to walk and _look in the goddamn mists of reality_ at the same time.”

“Roxy, hold up a second.” She turns and raises an eyebrow at Dirk. “Just trust me, okay, this is worth the delay.”

Dave sighs and rests against the concrete wall, sliding down to sit on the floor. It’s too dim for you to see through his dark shades, but you think he’s shut his eyes. Up ahead, Rose drifts to her mom’s side, watching him with unwavering attention as Roxy shoots Dad a questioning look.

Dad explains to her in a low voice, but you turn your attention back to Dave. He rubs his eyes once before letting his hands fall into his lap. His breathing deepens and slows, exhaling in two steady currents that turn over the dust motes like cogs in measured intervals, like a ticking clock, a metronome in the dust.

Dirk kneels beside him, watching his face carefully. Dad stands close behind you, breath drifting against your hair. It tickles, distracting, but you let him.

Minutes pass. A drop of sweat trickles down your neck. Roxy shifts, checking the time and glancing down the far end of the hallway.

Dave’s breath hitches, a jolt in the clockwork of his breath. Tendons in his neck go tense as he raises his head from the gritty concrete wall. “Can’t see,” he mutters.

“You can’t see?” Dirk repeats, half reaching out as though to help him up.

“I can’t see shit.” Dave gets up and dusts off his jeans. “’S all… like… I dunno. Not _foggy,_ not really, but…” He trails off. You can see he’s angry in the set of his mouth.

“Don’t sweat it.” Dirk shifts the bag over his shoulder and nods at Roxy to lead on. “I doubt we have to worry about it for a while. What did you see?”

“I mean, I don’t exactly have a lot of experience with _looking_ for shit.” Dave grabs his own backpack and hefts it up on his back. “It usually just _happens.”_

Rose breathes a gentle laugh that you doubt anyone but you can hear. You grin and fall into step behind Dad again.

“So what _did_ you see?” Dirk repeats.

“Everything.” You feel Dave’s hand rise up and rub his temple, but you don’t turn around. “It was like… on the one hand, we get there and jump in Grandpa Jake’s helicopter, woohoo, happy ending. On the other, the tunnel caves in and we drown in a lake. We get there and the helicopter never shows. Drones show up and kill us all. I’m seeing, like… fifteen different endings, here.”

“That’s… worrying.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“Has that ever happened before?”

“Once when I was freaking out about a math test, but…”

“So stress makes your vision inaccurate?”

“I don’t know, bro, I’m in eighth goddamn grade. You tell me.”

The Striders bicker back and forth in the dark as you trail after Dad. Once, during a lull, you feel Dave’s breath catch again, and a push in the air as Dirk turns and grabs his shoulder, but you don’t turn around. To be honest, you’re a little caught up in this new world behind your closed eyes. It’s like seeing a new color, you guess; viewing the world through a new filter, spying on people through their breathing, seeing how long you can navigate the darkness by feeling the way the air moves through the claustrophobic hallway.

You trip twice. The first time, you fall into Dad, who looks at you strangely but doesn’t comment. The second time, you walk right into the wall, and Dirk has to lunge forward and catch you before you hit the floor. After that, you keep your eyes open.

True to her word, Roxy gets you all to the end of the tunnel within two hours of leaving the bunker. You were expecting a ladder, like there was at the start, but instead there’s a heavy-looking metal door set deep in the concrete dead end. As soon as it comes in sight, Roxy hefts her rifle to one hand and waves at it with the other. “Bam, what did I fuckin’ say? And we didn’t even get lost.”

Dirk pointedly turns around and looks at the straight, featureless hallway behind you, then back at Roxy. She waves him off and bounds toward the door with far too much enthusiasm for a grownup mom/scientist/conspirator. “All right, everybody disembark! We got a fuckton of sitting around and waiting to do.”

You sigh and shift your backpack around. Dragging it around for hours has really started to chafe at your shoulders, and you cannot wait to put it down. You hear Dave’s shoes scuff the floor again, and turn to look for him. Ever since his failed attempt to “look in the goddamn mists of reality,” he’s been falling behind. Twice, Dirk had to call out something along the lines of “Did you hear that?” just to get the group to pause long enough for Dave to catch up.

Roxy readjusts her one-handed grip on her rifle and starts fiddling with a padlock the size of your fist. “Okay… combination time. Huh. Rose, what numbers would I use for this?”

Rose heaves a long-suffering sigh and drops her backpack. “Well, start with birthdays, Mom.”

“I don’t think I’d be vain enough to use mine… nope, didn’t work. Your birthday is too hard to remember which I guess is _technically_ my fault but I’m blaming you for it anyway.”

“By Fall Out Boy,” Rose says under her breath. You muffle a snicker. “What about Jaspers’s birthday?”

Roxy considers it for a second before tinkering with the padlock again. It clicks just a little too loudly in the echoing hallway.

“And there we go. Who else can’t wait for daylight?” Roxy grabs the handle and pulls.

A tiny trickle of dust drifts down between you and Dad.

Something overhead hisses, and then _crunches._

Dirk’s arm slams across your chest, throwing you backwards down the tunnel as the roof collapses with a deafening crash. You hit the concrete hard, Dave shouting something over the mayhem, Dad calling you with panic in his voice, and something like a jet engine getting louder.

You cough against the flying dust and stumble to your feet. Rubble from the roof is still falling, stinging you when it hits your skin. You cough again, eyes watering in the dust. Someone – Dave, you think – grabs your arm and drags you back into the tunnel. Dirk is yelling somewhere up ahead, and you turn to see him, sword in hand, struggling with the pile of rubble. He’s shouting at you. “…ust go! They’re outside, _go back!”_

The jet-engine whine grows deafening, and an immense shadow blocks out the light from above.

Dave stumbles over a chunk of concrete. You pull him back upright and backwards as the tunnel caves in in front of you.

Shards of stone fly from the impact zone, stinging your face. Your glasses protect your eyes from the worst of it, but the dust goes from thick to choking. You hold your breath and drag Dave back from the rubble, ears ringing, as another shadow appears in the hole left behind.

You can’t see much through the haze, but the silhouette of jutting spikes and the magenta glow tell you all you need to know.

It’s reaching for you.

Without thinking, you grab a current of air and throw it behind you. Dave jerks out of your grip as the burst of air – fresh air, outside air, full of energy and anger – drags him away from you. He’s calling for his brother, turning wide panicked eyes back to you.

Dirk materializes out of the dust, sprinting, sword raised.

“John!”

Metal clamps down around your chest and something stings at the back of your neck. Almost instantly, the world goes gray at the edges.

_“John!”_

The drone lifts you out of the tunnel and into the daylight. Two more massive robots hit the ground nearby, wings shunting closed. You’re going numb, but you twist sideways and see a fourth drone pulling someone from the other hole.

Rose.

She’s screaming and kicking, headband missing and hair flying. You never wanted to hear Rose scream. She’s the quiet one, all calm discourse and sipping tea… she isn’t made to scream…

Roxy appears in the hole, rifle at her hip, smoke trickling from the muzzle. She fires three more times in quick succession at the drone holding Rose, but the shots ricochet off its metal plating.

The air begins to vibrate, and at first you can’t quite tell if you’re feeling it or hearing it until the drone holding you turns and looks – is it looking? Can it see? – to the sky. You look up, struggling against the heaviness in your mind.

Far off in the sky, hazy and unfocused in your graying vision, is a helicopter.

There’s the most distant crack of a gunshot, and one of the empty-handed drones jerks and sparks, falling to the ground and twitching.

A mechanical hum vibrates through the drone holding you, and a moment later it rises off the ground.

Panic wells up at the back of your throat as the forest floor recedes. You struggle against the drone’s grip as best you can through the fog in your head, but your weak kicks do nothing. As a last ditch effort, you try to summon a thread of wind to try and knock the drone off balance, but you can’t feel the air around you anymore.

The drone carrying Rose lifts off too. The last drone goes down in a hail of gunfire.

Dad screams your name as your mind shuts down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: if you know the right places to go on the internets, you can definitely translate what Rose was saying in her sleep...


	7. DOWN FOR THE COUNT

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You're gonna be honest.
> 
> With all you've heard about the Zodiac Project, you really weren't expecting this.

You wake up about four times before you _actually_ wake up.

The first time, when something pinches at your wrist and you jolt half-awake. You’re aware of gravity and a harsh light behind your eyelids, and you get halfway to opening your eyes before you sink back into darkness.

The second time, when something in your dream screams with… with a voice like a tentacle, your half-conscious brain decides incoherently. Guttural and thick and slithering. The force of it drowns out everything in your mind and crowds your brain so completely that the pain of it jars you to awareness with a choked cry. Your eyes crack open, but you only see darkness. The pain recedes like an ocean wave, and you slip back into the empty confines of your mind without protest.

The third time, when several sharp-pointed objects scrape at your scalp and drag you out of a vague dream about a city made of gold. The things are sharp, but hesitant, and you hear a musical sound far off that could be a voice. You try to struggle awake again, but the sharp objects vanish and you’re pulled back under.

The fourth time, when you’re jolted by a loud, quick sound that you miss as soon as you’re aware of it. You can’t recall what it was – a voice? A slamming door? – but it leaves a ringing and an itching in your ears and you struggle to bring up a hand to try and rub the echoes away. Your arm feels like it doesn’t quite belong to you; there’s a delay between your brain telling it to move and when it actually does. Your hand gets halfway to your head before you pass out again.

The fifth time, you manage to open your eyes.

You’re in a small room reminiscent of a ship’s bunk. Harsh fluorescent lights make your eyes sting and water, but you blink and sit up. You half-expect an IV in your arm, but you can’t see any needle marks at all (though there’s an itching bump at the back of your neck). There’s a second bunk a few feet above you. The walls are bare and off-white, and a plain white door is set into the wall opposite you.

You stare at the door for several seconds, trying to work out what strikes you as so _wrong_ about it. It takes almost a solid minute for you to realize there’s no handle. Wherever it leads to, someone else will decide when you get to leave.

With a sigh, you finally heave yourself upright, careful not to bang your head on the bunk above you. No sooner do you swing your legs out to stand up than a voice drifts down from the upper bed –

“Oh, you’re awake?”

You can’t suppress a choked noise of shock as the strangest figure you’ve ever seen appears upside-down over the edge. By the mass of tangled black hair, you think it’s a girl, but she disappears again before you can catalogue any more of her features.

“Hang on, let me…” She leaps down from the top bunk, hanging in the air for an impossibly long time before touching down gracefully on the industrial carpet. When she turns to you with a dazzling smile, you can’t even answer.

Her skin is gray. Grayer than a corpse. Grayer than volcanic ash. The whites of her rusty-brown eyes are jaundiced to a dead, sickly yellow. Her hair is matted, oily, and looks like it’s never been cut in her life, trailing at her knees.

But commanding your attention right now is the pair of fist-sized, curling horns swooping out from her skull like a sheep’s. They come to sharp, dangerous-looking points – and though you can’t identify what they’re made of, you don’t doubt that they’re just as durable as they look.

She’s still smiling at you, waiting for you to say something. She brushes her hands down her sides, smoothing her skirt. You notice, belatedly, that her shirt bears the Aries symbol, and then you realize.

She’s part of the Second Zodiac.

You struggle to swallow. Your mouth is dry. “Uh… hi?”

She laughs delightedly. “Hi! I’m Aradia!” She suddenly darts away, clumped hair swinging behind her, and the door slides open silently to let her out.

You stare after her, wondering what the hell just happened. Has she ever seen a person before? She definitely didn’t act like it. Maybe she’s just… socially illiterate.

When you approach the door, it sits immovable in the wall, so you resign yourself to wandering around the room and inspecting your prison. There aren’t any windows, and the way the air hangs lethargic makes you wonder if you’re underground again. Apart from the two bunks, there’s no furniture – hell, there isn’t even a light switch to turn off the blinding fluorescents.

You resign yourself to waiting, and sit back on your bunk. Rose is here, too… somewhere. You hope she’s okay. You need to find her and break out of here. You have no idea where you’d go, though. Borrow a phone, maybe… call Jade… organize an escape attempt… talk to your Dad, if only for a few minutes to tell him you’re okay. You can’t imagine how worried he is.

The door slides open again, and you shoot back to your feet. _Please be Rose. Please be Rose. Please be Rose…_

It’s not Rose, of course. A tall woman in black lab gear walks in, clipboard in hand. Her lab coat bears a white 8 at her shoulder. “John Egbert. Thirteen. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, later moved to Maple Valley, Washington.” She flips a sheet of paper, not looking at you. “Primary caregiver, James Egbert, father. Lethal peanut allergy, twenty-forty vision, blood type A, suspected oxykinetic.” She puts the sheet back in place. “Follow me, please.”

You take an automatic step after her as she walks back out the door, but then grind your teeth and stop. You aren’t going anywhere without answers. She notices you not following and turns back, regarding you impassively. “Follow me, please,” she says again.

“Who are you?” You try to sound firm, but your voice cracks at the end.

“You don’t need to know that.”

“I kinda do.”

“Most of the other subjects call me Snowman. You can refer to me by that. If you please…” Snowman gestures at the door with her clipboard.

You stand your ground, fists curled at your sides. “Where’s Rose?”

“Rose Lalonde is elsewhere in this facility. She is undergoing an evaluation, as you will be. Now, follow me. Please.” She turns and walks out again. The door stays open.

You clench your jaw, but trail after her anyway.

The hallway she leads you down is deserted and stark white – a jarring contrast to Snowman’s jet black lab coat. There are thin square outlines on both walls, like someone had painted over doorways. You jog a little to catch up to Snowman. “Where is this?”

She doesn’t turn around. “Prospit MedCore. It’s been repurposed.”

You faintly remember the name from the article Dave sent you… when was it? Three days ago? Four, maybe? “Repurposed for what?”

Snowman doesn’t answer. Instead, she pulls out a keycard and swipes open a nearby door.

You follow her inside what… looks like a high school gymnasium? You blink several times before realizing that no, it’s not a gym, not really – there’s no hoops or bleachers, no lines on the floor. It’s just a wide, gym-sized room with shiny wood floors and, you notice, a dark tinted glass window that Snowman strides toward with purpose. She presses a button beside the window. “Who’s available for testing?” she says.

 _“Christ,_ woman. Give a guy some warning.” An unfamiliar voice, male and gruff, crackles over an invisible speaker somewhere overhead.

“Testing. Availability. Who.”

“Dunno. Nitram?”

“God _damn_ it, Jack. We want to _test_ him. Vantas?”

“Probably, but Nitram…”

“If you say one more word about Nitram I will shove this clipboard up your ass. Call Vantas in.” Snowman clicks the button again and strides back out the door. “Wait here,” she says as it swings shut behind her.

You take a few wandering steps into the middle of the gym. At first, you carefully probe at the gym’s air, looking for currents or vents, but the atmosphere is motionless and lethargic. You shoot a glance at the tinted window, conscious that there’s someone back there watching you. It sets your skin crawling. You stand in silence for several minutes, trying not to move much.

“Evaluation begins now.” That’s Snowman’s voice, crackling through the ceiling. You jump at the unexpected sound and look at the tinted window in bewilderment. What are they expecting you to do?

There’s a clank from behind you, and you feel a shove in the air as the door swings open. You turn to look just as someone plows directly into your chest.

You go down hard.

“What the fuck?” you yell, twisting away and staggering to your feet, but your attacker kicks your knees out and swings… what is that, a sickle? Whatever it is, it makes a dangerously sharp whoosh as it sails at your throat.

You roll away and leap back to your feet, jumping backwards to put distance between yourself and your assailant. For the first time, you get a decent look at him.

He’s charcoal gray too, like the girl from earlier, with the same jaundiced eyes and matted black hair. He’s backing off, a razor sharp sickle in each hand, breathing hard and glaring you down. He has horns too, but they’re short and rounded, like they’d been filed off.

He starts to circle you, shadowed eyes not leaving your face. You back away, keeping a careful distance between you. If he attacks you again, you’re not sure what to do – are you supposed to fight him? Is that your “evaluation”? If so, why does _he_ get weapons? What if he kills you? You don’t think they’d go to so much effort to capture you if they would just let you die so easily. Your steps take you close to the tinted window, and you suppress the urge to try and see inside it.

Your opponent takes a step closer, and you back away instinctively – your back hits the wall. It throws you off balance, which must register on your face; he flashes forward before you can recover, snarling at you like an animal, sickles raised high.

You hesitate, not knowing where to go, and the instant of debate almost costs you. You duck to the side, but the tip of a sickle drags along your forearm, stinging and ripping your skin. It hurts, but not enough to overcome your adrenaline rush, and you spin back to face him before he can swing again.

He’s _fast,_ though – faster than you, by far, and he has his weapons raised again, teeth bared and hands clenched tight around the handles. He’s holding the sickles oddly, a detached part of your brain notices; he’s attacking you tip-first, instead of slashing with the sharp edges. Is he trying to _avoid_ dealing a lethal strike?

Your moment of distraction lets those flashing tips swipe dangerously close to your chest, and you realize you have only two choices left – evade him until this sadistic “evaluation” is over, or defeat him. You aren’t sure how much endurance he has, but you’re already breathing hard, and he’s clearly trained in combat. Evasion is a bad idea.

So you have to beat him.

He swings again. You backtrack, let the sickles swish through the air in front of you, and lunge forward before he can recover. You barrel into him headfirst, and your forehead connects with his jaw with a crunch. He falters, unable to bring his sickles far enough back to slice at you, and you grab at his wrist, desperate to gain a weapon, even if it _is_ one you’ve never held before.

He’s expecting that, though, and wrenches his arm back with a snarl. His other arm comes in hard, elbow first, into the side of your neck. The impact loosens your grip, and he manages to get a leg between you and kicks you hard in the stomach. You stumble back, gasping for breath.

You aren’t going to physically overpower him. So that just leaves…

You reach up, focusing your world into the currents and emptiness of the air around you, and find a mental handhold in the air near the ceiling. You draw it downward and split it in two currents, even as you watch your attacker draw back again, blood dripping from his bared teeth, weapons raised and aimed at your throat.

You grab the currents with both hands and _throw_ them at him.

The air whistles and ruffles your hair as it rushes past your head. Your attacker falters for just a moment, yellowed eyes widening.

His sickles are ripped from his hands, flying across the gym. One of them hits the tinted window, slashing across it with a piercing shriek like nails on chalkboard. He’s thrown off balance and hits the ground on his hands and knees. He spits a mouthful of blood and foam on the wooden floor and pushes himself upright, eyeing you carefully.

You briefly wonder if he’s going to try going after his sickles, but a wave of dizziness washes over you. _Not this again,_ you groan internally as the world goes sideways. Black spots pop into existence behind your eyes.

Next thing you know, you’re being dragged upright by your arm. You don’t remember falling, but your vision is clearing up. You blink the rest of the haze away, and to your surprise, it’s your attacker holding you up, gray fingers clamped tight around your arm. He’s glaring at the tinted window with venom.

“Are we fucking done here?” he yells. His voice is raspy and hoarse. “I’m pretty sure we’re fucking done here.”

There’s an echoing silence. You get your balance back and swipe under your nose, but your hand comes away blood-free. That’s a first. He lets your arm go.

“Evaluation complete,” says Snowman over the speaker. “Show him where to go next, Vantas.”

“Go fuck yourself, Snowman.” He stalks over to the door and shoves it open. “You coming or what?”

You readjust your glasses and follow him out into the hallways. “So…” You bite your lip. “What the hell was that about?”

“Your evaluation?” He snorts. “Yeah, they suck. Don’t worry about it. They don’t do them often. It’s just ‘cause you’re new.”

“Right.” You’re not sure that makes much sense, but you let it go. “Where are we going?”

“Mess hall.” He turns a corner so abruptly you almost walk right past it. “Everyone else is probably there already.”

You have to jog to keep up. “Uh… who else…?”

“All of us. Your other friend too, probably.”

Rose?

“I’m John, by the way.”

“Karkat.” He plows into a swinging door shoulder-first, and you have to catch it before it swings back into your face.

Karkat leads you into what looks like it would have been the old center’s cafeteria before it was “repurposed.” Everything is painted a stark, blinding white, and there’s only two tables, bolted to the floor – and occupied.

Nine other corpse-gray teenagers look up at the sound of the door opening.

Rose looks up from her place at the table.

“Are they finally back?” someone says.

“It’s about damn time,” says someone else.

Someone asks Karkat a question, but you don’t notice.

Rose throws her arms around your neck and buries her face in your chest.

~

“This is Feferi,” Rose explains as you sit down beside her. “I’m sharing a room with her.”

The gray girl sitting across from you smiles and waves. “Oh my cod, he’s adorabubble,” she stage-whispers to Rose.

The boy sitting beside Feferi rolls his eyes and picks at the unidentifiable mush on his plate.

“And that’s Eridan.” Rose nods at him.

“But enough about us.” Feferi leans forward, not breaking eye contact with you. “Tell us about you.”

“Uh.” You glance at Rose. “I’m… not sure what you mean?”

“Whale, what can you do?” Feferi giggles lightly. “You’re psionic, right? You wouldn’t be here otherwaves.”

A plate hits the table on your left. You jump and turn to see Karkat sliding into the chair next to you. “Oxykinetic,” he mumbles. “He’s basically Tavros, but less lame and horrifically useless.” He swipes a finger inside his mouth, pulls it out coated in blood, and shows it to Feferi.

“Don’t be rude.” Feferi frowns at his hand until he withdraws it.

“It’s true.” Karkat picks at his own food. “And now that this one’s back” – he gestures at you with a spoon – “Tav’s probably getting culled.”

“Don’t _say_ somefin like that,” Feferi scolds. She brushes a lock of shockingly long hair over her ear as the smile slips from her face.

You have to do a double take. You thought that was her ear, but… “Are those… sorry, but are those _gills?_ ” you can’t stop yourself from asking.

Feferi looks up in surprise. “I… sorry, I forgot you’re new. They are!” She tips her head across the table to show you. “You can touch them, if you’re reel gentle.”

You carefully trace the protective fin-like covering. “Wh… how did you… I mean, were… you, like, born with these?”

She laughs and leans back again, turning to Eridan to whisper something, and you see her mouth is full of teeth like needles, thin and sharp and _that is way too many teeth for a human being._

Then her eyes flick over to yours and her eyes are pink. Bright, albino pink in the yellow sclera, _just like the ones that stared out at you from your computer screen so many days ago…_

You almost flip the table before you realize it couldn’t have been Feferi. Her skin is too light, her lips too gray, her smile too sweet and free of malice. She notices you looking and grins again, and yeah those are weird-ass teeth but you force a smile back.

“So.” Rose folds her napkin and places it beside her plate. “How did your evaluation go?”

You roll your eyes and jerk your head at Karkat. “He kicked my ass and cut my arm open.”

Karkat nods without looking your way, focused on his food.

Rose’s eyes narrow. “Where? Show me.” She grabs your offered arm and inspects the jagged line in your skin. “How did this happen?”

You jerk your head at Karkat again. He shrugs. “I could have gone for your throat,” he growls.

“You _did_ go for my throat.”

He flips you off and shovels mush in his mouth.

Feferi leans over the table and cocks her head at your injury. “Oh, I betta that Kanaya can fix that. Kanaya!” She waves at a girl further down the table. “The new kid got on the prawn end of Karkat’s sickles.”

The other girl raises a slim eyebrow. “ _Prawn_ end?”

“ _Wrong_ end. C’mon, stop taking the _pun_ out of everyfin!”

Kanaya – you assume – sighs and slides off her chair. She comes over and examines your arm. “Karkat, why do you always go so deep?” she scolds. Her voice is low and pleasant, and her horns curve gracefully inwards.

Karkat rolls his eyes. “It’s not a fucking _test_ if I don’t try to kick his ass,” he points out around a mouthful of mush.

Kanaya sighs and wraps long gray fingers around your arm. They glow blindingly white for a few seconds, and when she removes them, your skin is flawless again. “Has anyone seen Aradia?” she asks, dusting off her hands as you inspect your arm.

“On the sealing with Sollux.” Feferi points at a corner of the cafeteria. You and Rose exchange a confused look, and turn to see…

Yup, that’s the girl from your bunk, matted hair swaying as she hovers by the ceiling, plate in her lap. She’s talking quietly with a skinny boy who is also hovering there, apparently without any effort at all.

“Are they…?” Rose asks before you can.

Feferi nods. “They do that a lot when Sollux is feeling antiso-shoal.”

“Which is _all the time,_ ” Karkat says not quite under his breath.

Kanaya swats his arm before going back to her seat.

“I’m going to be frank,” Rose says. “I’m still not sure we’ve been adequately filled in on this… entire situation.”

Feferi nudges Eridan. “You do it.”

Eridan sighs and pushes his glasses up his nose. They sit at a funny angle, and it takes you a minute to realize that it’s because he has gills too. “Fuckin’ _fine._ Jesus.” He drops his utensils and brushes his hands free of invisible dust. “Get comfortable. One long ass story comin’ right up.”


	8. DOWN TO BUSINESS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Second Zodiac project is worse than you thought.
> 
> And seriously _what the hell is up with everybody having horns?_

“Let’s start with what we can cut out. What d’you two know already?”

Rose trades a look with you. “We know… Betty Crocker discovered psionic power some fifteenish-twentyish years ago. She tried funneling it into human test subjects, first adults which failed spectacularly, and then adolescents, which… also failed spectacularly?”

Eridan nods. Encouraged, Rose goes on. “After that, she began running… some sort of tests, we don’t know what exactly, on infants and toddlers, children of her employees. It was something of a success, but four of those employees got wind of the experiments and fled with their respective children. That would be us.”

“Anythin’ else?”

Rose looks back to you, one blonde eyebrow raised. You shrug. “That about sums it up.”

“Well this is gonna be a long fuckin’ story.” Eridan heaves a long-suffering sigh. “Yeah, basically all that shit happened. After that, those of us who weren’t lucky enough to get out a the program had to disappear before anyone noticed we were gettin’… weird.” He gestures vaguely at the lightning-bolt horns embedded in his skull. “A course, it’s called the Zodiac project, can’t be four kids short. The old witch managed to scrounge up another three test rats, couldn’t find a fourth, so she just… made Fef over there.”

Feferi looks down at her plate.

“You’re her… daughter?” Rose sounds as surprised as you are.

Feferi puts on a smile, but it’s not as sincere as her others. “Genetically, yes. But that’s aboat it.”

“And hey, it worked out okay.” Eridan nudges her with an elbow. “Fef got exposed way younger. She’s better attuned to it than any of us are. Hence the gills.”

“What do you mean? Attuned to what?” You can’t imagine what _gills_ have to do with anything.

Eridan looks at you with lidded eyes, as if asking _Are you stupid?_ “Crocker found the thing in the ocean. That’s where it lives. The thing that makes all the power. Christ, they’re _really_ out a’ the loop, ain’t they.” He snorts. “Anyway, Fef can talk to it better than anyone except maybe the old bat herself.”

“So what, exactly, is… _it?_ The thing in the ocean?” you prod.

Eridan shrugs, inspecting his nails. “Dunno. Never seen it. All I know is it’s alive, and it’s big, and when it so much as _whispers_ at you, your ears start bleedin’.”

“Cthulhu?” you mutter to Rose, only half-kidding.

Feferi answers with a string of gibberish.

“I’m… sorry, what the hell did you just say?”

“Gl’bgolyb,” she enunciates slowly. “That’s its name. I think. But that’s reely all I know about it.” Her eyes flick over to Eridan again.

A clatter of silverware draws your attention to Karkat again. You’d almost forgotten he was there. “Oh for God’s sake, Ampora,” he groans. “Finish the goddamn story before I _sterilize_ you with your own shitty-ass _horns._ You are _useless._ ”

“Kanaya’s gonna be pissed if she’s got to come back over here and fix your fuckin’ blood pressure again, Vantas. Sit down.” Eridan waves him off. “Besides. Not like they’re going anywhere.”

You cast an uneasy glance at Rose, but she’s carefully rubbing off the last of her black lipstick with the aid of her reflection in a metal spoon. She doesn’t look the same without it.

“Anyway.” Eridan steeples his fingers. (You notice, rather distantly, that they’re stained with the same thin yellow that his horns are made of. You’ll have to find a polite way to ask what the hell is up with those things.) “We grew up at this other place. Somewhere in… fuckin’ Cuba, I think. Called it Skaia. Way bigger’n this dump.” He waves a hand idly at the ceiling. “But some shit happened there and we had to fuckin’ _move,_ and here we all are.”

“Who exactly is _we_?”

Eridan pushes his glasses back in place and gestures at Feferi. “Well, start with Fef. She’s the Heiress – that’s what they call her, anyway – and she’s got gills. She’s kind of… what the _shit_ did they call it?”

“Aquakinetic,” Feferi supplies helpfully.

“Yeah, whatever. She moves water with her mind. Then there’s me, I do… ugh, _god,_ it’s a stupid name, but it’s… white magic.”

“It’s… what?” You and Rose trade another look. You’re doing an awful lot of that lately.

Eridan sighs and holds his hand out, palm forward. Before you can ask what he wants you to do with it, a hissing spark pops into existence at his fingertips, arcing between them like a spider web. It’s like electricity, you think, like if lightning were a liquid.

The pale sparks die only a moment later. “Yeah, it’s not that impressive. But the Crew seems to like it, so…” He shrugs.

“The Crew?” Rose leans forward.

“Yeah, you know… well, _no,_ I guess you don’t. The Midnight Crew, that’s a codename for our… handlers, I s’pose. The people who keep an eye on us and make sure we don’t kill each other.”

An image of Snowman flashes through your mind.

“Anyway, you’ve already met Karkat.” Eridan waves in Karkat’s general direction. “Emotional telepathy. He gets to sense what everyone in the whole room is feeling. So if he’s bein’ a shit, just remember that an’ try not to punch him.”

“Like you could stand _two goddamn minutes_ in my head,” Karkat snaps. “Smug asshole.”

“Never said I could, you insufferable prick, now pipe down. Kanaya, you sorta met her. She can fix minor injuries, they’re working her up to the bigger stuff in evaluation. She’s kind of our group mum.”

You look down the table and identify the girl who healed your arm. She’s sitting quietly, listening intently to one of the others – a short girl with clearly self-cut hair, needle-like horns and a grin like a shark.

“Who’s that she’s talking to?” you ask.

“That’s Terezi. She’s blind. I mean, fuck, that’s not… that’s not her power or anything, but… yeah. Anyway, she’s some fucked-up sort of telepathic. Can smell what people are thinking.”

“She can smell thoughts?” Rose leans forward to look down the table.

“We think so. She likes lying to the Crew to trip ‘em up, but Snowman can usually tell when she’s makin’ shit up. Now over _there_ ”—Eridan flicks a hand at the two figures floating by the ceiling—“is Aradia and Sollux. Both freaks.”

“Eridan, they gave you a literal _magic frond._ ” Feferi frowns at him. “Don’t go throeing names around.”

“Whatever.” He rolls his eyes. “Aradia, she’s telekinetic and she does that hovering thing a lot. Not much else for her. She was a replacement for one a’ you four, can’t remember which. She used to be more fun, but then she fuckin’ died and now she don’t talk to anyone but Sol.”

You stare at Aradia. “You… she died?”

“For like twenty minutes, yeah. Part a’ the shit that went down at our old facility. Don’t worry, she’s fine now. I think you’re sharin’ a room with her?”

“I guess?”

“Figures. Good luck with that. Now _Sollux._ ” Eridan snorts.

“What about him?” You look back at the ceiling as discreetly as you can. The boy hovering next to Aradia doesn’t have a plate – he’s kind of emaciated, from what you can tell, all sharp angles and jutting bones. You have to do a double take at his horns, but you count again, and he definitely has four.

Eridan doesn’t say anything, so Feferi steps in. “He’s… kind of the Baroness’s crown pearl. He’s more powerful than any of the otters, that’s for shoal. Sollux is krilliant.”

“What does he do?” Now Rose is glancing up from the corner of her eyes curiously.

“More pike what _can’t_ he do.” Feferi plays with her silverware and doesn’t look at you. “I think it kind of started with his dad, he was pretty high up in the company and volunteered for the initial testing. But then that whole thing went reely wrong… I don’t think he’s dead, but they took his kids anyway and put the older one in the program, but he burned out reel bad. So now it’s just Sollux.” She shrugs. “They know what _not_ to do with him, you know? But anywaves, he’s… let’s see, telekinetic, electrokinetic, and he can speak binary. Or read it, I guess. But that might just be ‘cause they’ve been teaching him how since he was born.”

It doesn’t escape your notice that Feferi eschewed her fish puns almost entirely. You guess she’s being pretty serious.

Just then, something bumps your elbow. You jump and spin so fast you almost knock into Rose. Standing right by your arm is the tiniest girl you’ve ever seen, head tilted and eyes wide. “You’re the new boy,” she says, and _oh my god she sounds like the smallest kitten and you are weak._

“Oh my god, Nep, leave them alone, they are nowhere near ready enough to handle your bullshit,” Karkat snaps.

She ignores him, holding your gaze steady, and holds out something in her hands. It takes you a minute to identify what exactly it is, because her hands are obscured by the insanely long sleeves of her coat, dark green and clearly made for someone twice her size. You reach out instinctively, and she carefully deposits something warm in your hands – a cup of tea, from the smell of it.

You look back up at her (even though you’re sitting and she’s standing, you’re still almost at eye level) and say, “Thank you.”

She grins and she has kitten teeth, sharp and tiny and definitely not human. “AC hopes the new boy gets his horns soon!”

“Wow, okay, _that_ was a fucked-up thing to say. Go _away,_ Nepeta.” Karkat makes a shooing motion at her.

“AC thinks Karkat is angry he lost to the new boy.” The cat girl raises an eyebrow – hell, she can’t be more than eight or nine years old. She’s just so _tiny and her horns are shaped like cat ears holy shit._

“I was _supposed_ to lose, you weird-ass—”

“Nepeta!” A darker voice booms from somewhere down the table. The tiny girl jumps guiltily and turns. “Stop pestering them and come finish your food.”

“AC was giving a peace gift!” she fires back. “AC wants to make friends!”

You identify her conversation partner – a tall boy built like a brick wall, clearly one of the oldest at the table. You’d put his age at around… sixteen? Seventeen? His hair is shoulder length and stick straight, and you’d be willing to bet it’s his coat Nepeta’s wearing. “You can make friends later. Eat now.”

Nepeta sticks a gray tongue out at him, but bounces back to her seat, turning to flash her kitten teeth at you again in a feral grin.

“And _that_ is Nepeta.” Karkat pinches the bridge of his nose. “ _God_ she’s weird. And yeah, I _do_ actually realize how ironic it is that I’m saying that.”

“She’s eight,” Feferi says. “She’s a little more… uhh… wild than most of the otters.”

“That’s puttin’ it mildly.” Eridan picks at his yellow nails. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard her talk in first person. Anyway, she’s fast as fuck an’ that’s about all she does.”

“What about that guy she was talking to?” You sneak another look down the table at him. He’s the tallest here, by far.

“That’s Equius.” Karkat jabs a spoon at him down the table. “He doesn’t talk much except to Nepeta. Pretty sure he thinks he’s her protector. Like she needs protecting.”

“It was one time, Karkat, and you startled her!” Feferi frowns at him.

“I still have scars,” Karkat shoots back. “Anyway, yeah, Equius is strong. And insanely fucking smart, but like I said, he doesn’t talk much.”

You eye Equius cautiously and note that one of his horns looks like it’s broken. You wonder if it hurts him, or if he even noticed.

“And that gull sitting next to him” —Feferi’s voice cuts into your thoughts— “is Vriska. Try not to talk to her, she’s kind of a beach.”

You have to lean forward a little more to see around Equius’s massive frame, but you catch a quick glimpse of a girl with tumbling wild hair and glasses. She’s laughing, and you can hear it above the clamor of the table full of teenagers – she laughs like a Disney villain, all caught-breath cackles and deep enough to start an uneasy stir in your stomach. You lean back and stare at the table, trying to swallow back the sour taste in your throat.

“What’s her power?” Rose asks.

“They don’t reely know for shore. At first they thought she was telepathic, ‘cause she could get anyboaty to do waterever she wanted. But that theory fell through when she was still little, so then they thought she was somefin complicated, like she could finfluence brain waves, but then that fell through too.”

“Yeah. Now they just think she can just control probability.” Eridan still hasn’t looked up from his fingernails. “Bullshit if you ask me, but they haven’t been able to _disprove_ it, so they’ve just been running with that.”

“That seems kinda OP,” you comment.

They stare at you in bewilderment.

“Uh. Overpowered. Like, damn, that’s sort of a big thing to control?”

“Of course it’s a big fucking thing to control, that’s why everyone shits themselves when she so much as looks their way.” Karkat shoves his empty plate aside.

“And on the other side of her…” Eridan twists in his seat to point, “…there, in the wheelchair. That’s Tavros. Don’t worry about him, he’s not useful for much. They only put him in the program to replace you when you lot disappeared.”

You can just barely see him when you lean forward as far as you can – a wheelchair, ink-black hair like everyone else in the room, a huge pair of horns as big around as your arm. “What happened to him?” you ask. Under most circumstances, it might be in poor taste, but you get the feeling that etiquette isn’t too important here.

“Vriska happened to him,” Karkat growls under his breath.

“Wh… really? What did she do?” You glance nervously back down the table.

“Like Eridan said. Some shit went down at our last facility.” The way he says it makes it clear you aren’t going to find out, so you let it go.

“And… I think that’s all?” Feferi glances around the room. “Wait, no, where’s Gamzee?”

“Back in solitary, I think.” Karkat gets up and grabs his dish. “Idiot tried to break out again. They’re probably gonna keep him under more goddamn sedation for another week.”

“Again? Dumb motherglubber.” Feferi shakes her head, hair bouncing with the motion. “Whale, I hope you don’t have to meet him for a bit. He’s not very stabubble.”

“Stabubble?” you repeat.

“Stable, sorry.”

Karkat swipes Eridan and Feferi’s empty plates. “Do we have anything to do tonight?” he asks.

“Mmmm, not really, why?” Feferi hands him her silverware.

“I’m gonna see if Sollux will get into the cache to show the new kids the files. Your story was absolute shit, Eridan.”

“Well excuse the fuck outta you, Vantas.”

“Bite me.”

“Wait, wait.” Rose holds up a hand. “Sollux can hack into the facility’s servers? Won’t they be able to tell?”

“Yeah, they will, but it’s not like they’re gonna try and stop him.” Karkat rolls his eyes at the skinny boy hovering by the ceiling. “He gets to do pretty much whatever the shit he wants. Whenever the Crew tries to stop him, he fakes a burnout so they have to call the old hag and tell her they damaged her precious little pilot-in-training. They’ve basically stopped fucking with him.”

You look back at Sollux, then at Rose. You see the same thought bloom in her eyes.

Maybe Sollux is your ticket out of here.

~

“Fuck no.” Sollux’s eyes are hidden behind multicolored glasses, but you can feel him glare at you. “Fuck no, fuck the new kids, and fuck you too, KK.”

“Sollux, can you stop being a useless shitnipple and do something worthwhile for once in your pointless existence?”

“Oh, wow, since you asked so _nicely._ ” Sollux hasn’t yet smiled, so you can’t quite see his teeth, but the way he lisps, mangling sibilants as he goes, gives you enough of an idea.

“You hypocritical sack of dog shit, Captor! _You’re_ the one who’s been trying to get their goddamn attention for _fucking years,_ and now that they’re _here,_ suddenly you’re a train full of _the sourest grapes_ that ever grew in the pitiful orchard of your _tortured little brain._ It doesn’t even take you five fucking minutes, you douche!”

“Fuck you, I was only trying to get the one girl’s attention.” But Sollux isn’t looking at any of you now.

“Oh!” Rose gasps a little. “You’re… John, remember those spambots? The ones that harassed us on Pesterchum since forever?”

“I…” It clicks. “Holy shit, that was _you?_ ”

Sollux heaves a sigh and crosses his arms over his bony chest. He’s older than you by at least three years and he towers over you. He didn’t look this tall when he was hunched in a ball midair earlier. “No, I only tried talking to the other girl. Not either of you. That was Terezi, but it was harder for her, she had to use the thinktyping which she’s fucking shit at, and she _still_ doesn’t get it, not really.”

“You were the one in binary, correct?” Rose presses.

“Well, yeah, but she never broke the code. I figured she’d use a translator for it, and I couldn’t risk it getting traced back here, so I had to use a cipher, but she never fucking got it and I gave up. Thanks a lot.”

“For what?!” you yell much louder than you meant to. “What the fuck did you expect us to do? What were you even trying to say?”

“We were trying to get help!” Sollux shouts right back in your face, and you shut up. “What, you think we like it here? That just because we grew up like this, we’re used to it?” Sollux flashes a hand at you, and there’s a smell like ozone as something shoves your chest, sending you staggering back.

There’s a flash of gray and a thud, and Sollux is on the ground, Karkat’s knee pressed into his chest. “You fucking try that again, shithead, and we’re gonna have some serious fucking issues.”

Sollux growls something in reply and shoves Karkat away. He gets to his feet, eyeing you and Rose warily. “I can’t show them everything,” he grumbles. “Takes too much to keep the connection up. They wouldn’t be able to get through the first shitty file.”

An idea sparks in your mind. “Wait, so you can’t keep the connection up for long, but you _can_ send Pesterchum messages, right?”

“Sometimes.”

“And… Rose, Pesterchum has a file sharing feature, right?”

She nods, and you can tell she’s thinking the same thing you are.

“So?” Sollux is still staring you down with open hostility. “You want me to send you an entire decade’s worth of research over a chat client that you _still_ won’t even be able to read?”

“Not to me.” You grin at Rose and look back up at Sollux. “Can you find a user named turntechGodhead?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everybody get in the prayer circle for dave strider


	9. ON LOCKDOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You've done approximately jack shit for four days.

You’ve instructed Sollux to preface the massive pile of data he’s about to dump in Dave’s inbox with a coded message so he won’t just think it’s spam and delete it. But apart from that, you’ve done approximately jack shit for four days.

The first night, Aradia hangs upside down from the top bunk and talks with you. At your request, she demonstrates her telekinesis by carefully lifting your glasses straight off your face and onto hers, without letting go of the bunk railing.

“And don’t worry about Sollux,” she assures you with her bright, wild grin that looks downright sinister in the dark. “He’ll come around. He just doesn’t like most people, except for like… me, Terezi, and Karkat. He talks to Feferi sometimes, but she’s like, _eleven._ ” She takes your glasses off and hands them back down to you.

“Are you and him…?”

“Not really.” She puffs a half-dreadlocked bit of hair out of her face. “It’s complicated. The Crew doesn’t want us getting too attached. That’s why in most of our evaluations they make us fight each other. And it’s why they didn’t do anything back at Skaia when there were… umm…” Her voice trails off and she vanishes back onto her bunk.

“So… what exactly happened at Skaia?” You figure it couldn’t hurt to ask.

Aradia doesn’t answer you for the rest of the night, but you do feel a little more at ease.

~

Day Two, no one tells you to do anything, so you find Rose at breakfast. (Weird orange mush with blue pellets. It looks like cat food mixed with rat poison, but you eventually eat it.) Together, you wander around Prospit MedCore and talk in quiet tones about how the hell you’re supposed to get out of here.

“Do you think Dave will understand the code?” Rose asks, peering into a blacked-out room. She tries the door, but it’s locked.

“If he doesn’t, Dirk probably will.” You poke at a poorly-painted-over window. “Or Jade. The question is what they’ll do with the files they get. Karkat said they document everything that goes on here. All experiments and test results should be in there.”

“The coordinates for Prospit should be there somewhere. Do you think they’ll work out that we’re here?”

“Well, I mean, they captured us, right?” You try a different door. Locked. “They probably recorded that somewhere? Maybe not an admittance form, but... they _have_ to have our evaluation results in there, right?”

“Maybe.” Rose shrugs. “But there are a thousand things that could go wrong here. Dave might not see the message, or write it off as spam without looking at it. They might not work out the binary code. The files might not mention Prospit at all. Or they might try to get to us, but get killed or captured.”

“What’s your point?” _Leave it to Rose to point out every detail that could go wrong._

“My point is, we have to have a backup plan in case they don’t arrive.” She glances casually over her shoulder. “Do you think the other Zodiac children would help us escape?”

You think about that for a long moment, and finally say, “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably? I mean, they hate it here…” Your voice trails off. “They _do_ hate it here, right? I mean, that’s what Sollux said.”

“Sollux was _only_ speaking for himself,” Rose points out.

“Well, do _you_ like it here?”

“They’re _different,_ John. They’ve grown up here. Experiments and cruelty are all they’ve ever known. According to Feferi, some of them are very, _very_ good warriors. If we try to get out, they might even try to stop us. It’s like Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Okay, so… we talk to them, try to find out where their loyalties lie…?”

“I think that would be wise.” Rose scratches a bit of dried paint off of a door. Prospit was repurposed in a hurry, it seems. “We can try to organize an escape attempt with any of them who seem sympathetic to our cause or want to get out of here. It’ll take time, so we can wait and see if anyone will come for us.”

“What do we do if the Midnight Crew asks us to… you know. _Do_ stuff.” You wave a hand uselessly.

Rose raises a blonde eyebrow. “Then I suggest we do it.”

~

A few hours later on Day Two, you’re cornered by the wild-haired girl with glasses and the laugh that makes you think of a Disney villain – Vriska, you vaguely remember. Up close, her grin shows graying gums and teeth too sharp to be normal.

“So you’re the new Taurus, huh?” she says instead of hello. One lens of her glasses is opaque black, which strikes you distantly as kind of weird. “Bout damn time. I hope they get rid of Tav now. Such a draaaaaaaag.” The way she stretches the word out, open-mouthed, gives you the same sensation of hearing nails scraping slowly down a chalkboard. You struggle not to cringe. “He used to be useful, can you believe that? And look at him now. Did you know he can still technically walk? They say his ‘paralysis’ is psychosomatic. And then they yell at _me_ for trying to help him. Tell me how _that’s_ fair.”

You still haven’t said a word, but Vriska just goes right on. “They’ve been talking about culling him from the program. Well, they haven’t technically told us yet. I overheard Snowman telling Crowbar that. Keep it on the down low, would you?” She winks – you think? It’s hard to tell with only one of her eyes visible – and grins that maniacal grin again. “John, right?”

You manage a nod.

“I look _forward_ to getting to know you.” She dips her glasses down her nose, and with a jolt of horror you see a blank, scabbed patch of skin over where her other eye should be. “And be careful, okay? Not everyone is as _nice_ as me.” She pushes her glasses back into place and saunters away.

~

It's dinner on Day Two and you’re sitting at the end of the table, picking warily at the same orange mush and blue pellets they’d given you for breakfast. Rose isn’t here yet, so you keep an eye on the door. The needle mark on the back of your neck itches – you can’t figure out why it hasn’t healed over yet. You reach up to feel it.

“Scratching it just makes it worse,” says a rough, nasal voice, and the red tip of a cane whips down next to you fast enough to make you jump. The girl who takes her seat there has the same shark grin and hacked-off hair you remember from yesterday – Terezi.

“I wasn’t…”

“Yes you were. I can smell it.” She leans over at you and takes an exaggerated sniff. You recoil, and she laughs. “And don’t worry about it. It’ll heal over eventually.”

Your hands itch to touch the needle mark again, but you keep them firmly in your lap. “What exactly is it from?”

Terezi hums and tilts her head. Her garish red glasses reflect the flickering fluorescents in a sharp red glare that makes you squint. “How would _I_ know?” she says, grinning like a chessmaster whose opponent just made a grave, game-changing error.

You try to remember your talk with Feferi yesterday – what did she say Terezi’s psionic power was? Smelling thoughts or something, right? “Well,” you say slowly, “if someone _else_ knows, then that means _you_ know. Right?”

Terezi cackles, a scratchy, hoarse sound like the crumpling of paper. “You catch on quick. I like you.” Her cane taps a quick, irregular rhythm on the concrete floor. “Basically it all has to do with your _brain._ ” She leans in, and even though you know she can’t see you, you feel like she’s staring into your eyes. “See your dinner? It’s copper based with cobalt pellets. Copper and cobalt are the primary reagents in the energy exchange that happens every time you do a Thing with your power.” She says this all very fast, like she's reciting from a list.

You blink. That was a lot more exposition than you were expecting. “Uhh… okay?”

Terezi raises a hand and flicks one of her horns. It makes a dull clack. “That’s basically what these are made of. Here, feel.” Before you can react, she grabs your fingers and plants them on a needle-shaped horn. It feels like metal, cold and dead under your hand. “When your body tries to filter it out, it comes out of your skull. Spent copper and cobalt. That’s all this is. And the Crew uses horn growth to see how proficient your brain is at processing the power. The smaller your horns are, the better your psionics will be. So _they_ say, anyway.”

Against your will, your eyes flick over to the boy in the wheelchair. His horns are thick and unwieldy, and you realize why everyone seems to agree he’s useless. Unexpectedly, he looks up and meets your gaze across the room. The undiluted _venom_ in his eyes has you quickly turning back to Terezi. “Okay, so… the shot in my neck? I just thought that was a sedative or something.”

“It was that, too. But it had a neural primer in it, too. And it _miiiight_ have a chemical dampener.” Her shark grin hasn’t wavered an inch. It’s starting to weird you out.

Rose finally pushes through the swinging cafeteria doors. She glances over the table for you, and when she notices Terezi sitting abnormally close to you (when the fuck did she get so _close?_ You can hear her _sniffing_ you) she raises an eyebrow, but takes a tray and sits on your other side. “Terezi,” she says by way of greeting.

Terezi flicks out her tongue like a lizard. “New girl.” Without further ado, she whips out of her chair and leaves the cafeteria, banging the doors open with her cane. They swing shut with a new long gash in the paint.

Rose blinks at the swinging doors and looks back at you.

You shrug and gesture at her plate. “Don’t eat the blue shit.”

~

You spend most of Day Three poking around Prospit some more, doing your best to get a mental map of the place. Rose is busy trying to talk with the Zodiac kids, so you’re exploring on your own, but after about a few hours of wandering, a scuffle draws your attention to the same gym-like room you had your “evaluation” with Karkat in. Cautious at first, you approach the door, but it’s wide open.

You peer in as someone says, “…goodness’ sake, you’re supposed to _kill_ it.”

“AC will kill what she _wants_ to kill!” There’s Nepeta, for once without her far-too-big coat, hands raised in attack mode at a training dummy Equius holds up for her. “AC plays with her prey first!”

As she speaks, she swipes out at the dummy with a hand too fast for you to follow. There’s the sound of ripping leather, and four perfectly parallel stripes appear on the dummy’s torso. Shallow stripes. Nonlethal stripes.

“You’re not _supposed_ to play with it,” says Equius, sounding almost scandalized. “Are you _ever_ going to do as they tell you?”

Nepeta huffs and crosses her arms. You can see a glint of blue at her hands, but you’re too far away to see clearly. “AC is her own purrson!” she says defiantly, rolling her r’s like a purr. She spots you then, and her face lights up as she waves. “John is here!” she announces happily, and before you can react, she’s flashed away and reappears inches from you, grinning up at you with her sharp little kitten teeth. “Is John here to play with AC and Equius?”

“Uh… not really, I just heard it from the hallway. You can keep playing, though.” You shoot a (not nervous at all) glance at Equius, who regards you impassively through cracked sunglasses.

“Will John watch AC destroy her prey?” Nepeta bounces in place and holds up her hands. “AC is a deadly huntress!”

On each of her spread fingers, her nails are dark cobalt blue and very, very long.

“S…sure,” you manage, caught more than a little off guard. Those aren’t even nails, not really – they’re claws, four inches each, ending in jagged inward-curved hooks made for ripping flesh apart. The sleeves of her coat had always covered them up, you realize with a dim spark of interest.

Nepeta giggles and vanishes again; an instant later the dummy is in shreds, strips of leather hanging down, bits of stuffing fluttering to the floor. Equius lets the ruined dummy fall and brushes stuffing off his arms. “Don’t show off,” he admonishes Nepeta, who stands a few feet away looking extraordinarily satisfied. “It’s unbecoming.”

“Equius’s _face_ is unbecoming.” She sticks out her gray tongue at him.

“Do you want to do one more?”

She nods excitedly.

“Go find another one, then.”

She darts off, too fast to follow, and you’re left alone with Equius.

“She seems…” You hesitate, searching for a word to describe Nepeta. “Cheerful.”

Equius shrugs, rolling his massive shoulders. “She is young.”

“Kinda young to be such a… warrior, I guess?”

He says nothing, but you get the sense he agrees.

“Well, uh, I’m…” You shift your weight from one foot to another. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your… training, or whatever. I’ll get going.” You turn to duck out the door.

“A word of advice, John.”

You pause but don’t turn around.

“Do as they tell you.”

You half-turn, but out the corner of your eye, you see Equius cleaning up the ruined dummy. He isn’t looking in your direction. “Why?” you can’t help asking.

“They’re always watching.” Equius still doesn’t look at you. “You learn that quickly.”

It strikes you that Equius has been in the program longer than anyone else, except for maybe Sollux. “So?”

Equius takes off his sunglasses and wipes beading sweat from his forehead. His eyes are ringed with the same deep blue Nepeta’s claws are made of. “They may need you,” he says quietly, so quiet you have to struggle to hear him. “But you are by no means untouchable. They can and will punish you for misbehavior.” He hefts the dead weight of the training dummy and walks away.

~

After breakfast on Day Four, you meet Gamzee Makara.

You and Rose had stayed in the cafeteria after everyone else had wandered out.

“Any luck?” she asks once the room is empty, with the air of a teacher asking just _where_ your homework is.

You shrug. “It’s… hard to get a read on any of them.”

“Well, who can we rule out?”

“Vriska. She seems… kind of unstable. I don’t really want her on my team.”

Rose nods. “Understandable. According to Kanaya, she was at least partially responsible for the events that transpired at their last facility.”

“Skaia?” You frown. “Did she say what exactly happened there? No one will tell me.”

Rose glances at the swinging doors briefly before leaning forward and slipping into her shit-talking voice. “From what I understand, the so-called Midnight Crew had been pressured by the CrockerCorp higher-ups into running group experiments. Field Leadership And Response Practice, I believe, was the proper name – they were simulations, scenarios, field tests and such. One of the simulations went quite badly wrong. People were maimed and killed. The facility itself suffered some fairly severe damage – hence the move here to Prospit.”

“But she didn’t say exactly what _happened?_ ”

“She didn’t seem keen on reliving the memory.” Rose tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Without her trademark black lipstick, she looks pale and exhausted. “Suffice to say, any injuries the other children may have are almost positively a result of the Skaia incident.”

You remember Vriska’s empty, scabbed eye socket and suppress a shudder. To distract yourself, you ask, “How about you? Any escape ideas?”

“None so far. Most areas of the facility that could possibly lead to exits are off-limits and guarded by a Crew member. I’ve been trying to talk with Sollux, but he seems… reticent at best. I think he’s avoiding me, truth be told.” Rose smiles shallowly and picks at a speck on the flimsy cafeteria table. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen him at all this morning. He wasn’t at breakfast earlier.”

You tilt your head up to look at the empty corner of the ceiling where Sollux usually eats. “Yeah. I haven’t seen Aradia, either. Her bunk was empty this morning.”

Rose hums. “That’s worrying. I wonder if Feferi—”

The swinging doors crash open.

You look up quickly to see a tall, lean boy enter – horns so long they almost scrape the top of the door frame – wild black hair that obscures half his face – patches of gray vitiligo that look like war paint on his skin – hands too big for his body, hands that could probably crush your skull like a piece of toast.

“One motherfucking week in the slammer and we got some _fresh fucking meat.”_ He stalks toward you and Rose, slow and shuffling. “I got to see what all is _up_ with these two.” From under the shadows of his matted hair, you can just see his eyes, dark and glittering.

“Gamzee Makara, I presume?” Rose is nonthreatening, conversational, but her shoulders are tense and you can practically _hear_ her counting the room’s exits, weapons, and hiding places.

He grins, wide and menacing and tinged with madness. He has teeth that overlap each other, like crocodile teeth crammed into a human mouth. He can’t be your age, can he? “That’s what they all up and motherfucking call me.”

Rose taps her nails on the table gently. She’s trying very hard to make it seem natural, just a casual habit, but to you it just sounds like the fluttering heartbeat of some small animal in its death throes. “This is John,” she gestures to you, “and my name is Rose.”

“I KNOW YOUR MOTHERFUCKING NAMES.”

Rose flinches at his roar, but you’re too stunned to react, even as your heart shoots into overdrive. Under the table, you carefully take hold of the sluggish air currents around you, prepared to use them if this Gamzee character gets anymore threatening.

“I was told you were in solitary confinement,” Rose comments, pretending he hadn’t startled her. “They say you get in trouble a lot.”

Gamzee’s lip curls in a snarl. _“They don’t know shit_ about the wicked business I got all going on up in my pan.” He shuffles forward, slow and deliberate. “Think they can play _motherfucking games_ with me. Pull out my soul and see what kinda shapes they can up and squeeze it into.”

Idiotically, you think of Play Doh and snicker.

Both Gamzee and Rose stare at you in bewilderment.

“It’s… uh… yeah nevermind.” You decide it’s better not to try and explain. “So, yeah, here’s the thing, if… Hypothetically, right? Hypothetically, if we were trying to, like, sort of… overthrow this whole establishment, descend into chaos and anarchy and such…” You’re babbling. You don’t know why. Something about the staring, dead way he looks at you. “Okay, right so we… sort of recruited Sollux to help us get out, and normally I wouldn’t be telling you this but you kinda seem like you’d be all about overthrowing the system and Rose please punch me in the face I’m trying to shut up I swear—”

Rose reaches over and pinches your wrist hard enough to bruise, and you manage to drag the screeching train derailment of your word-vomit to a grinding halt.

Gamzee is still looking at you, snarl faded from his lips as he regards you carefully. “My best bro Captor ain’t doing _motherfucking shit_ for the present time being,” he says, quiet and measured and dosed with a spice of madness that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. “He went and got himself shipped out to the grand motherfucking Empress this morning to get his spine all up and twisted in a way that _pleases Her Imperious Condescension._ ”

You trade a look with Rose. “He’s… what?”

Gamzee’s mouth stretches in an unsettling grin again. “They went and built him a motherfucking starship all set to reach the edge of the miraculous Milky Way,” he says like he’s clarifying anything. “But first they have to fit him for the ports before they can get all up and installing him in his _motherfucking destiny ship.”_

Under the table, you discreetly rub at your wrist. “Oh…kay… well whatever that means…?”

Rose reaches over like she’s going to pinch you again. You shut up immediately. “Our offer still stands,” she says. “If nothing else, it will certainly inconvenience the Midnight Crew.”

Gamzee’s impossibly wide grin gets even wider.

“Then that sounds _motherfucking bitchtits.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so that delay ahahaahaaa yeah I blame gamzee for that
> 
> for real why is he so fucking hard to write
> 
> ((Minor note: my house's air conditioning is completely busted as of this morning. My roommates and I have had to scatter to friends houses bc it's June and we live in the semitropical zone that is Georgia. This all boils down to: I probably won't be able to get the next chapter out until it's fixed and that could take about 2 weeks so just be ready for that.)


	10. MAN DOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fuck white rabbits and all their symbolism, honestly.

When you wake up the next morning, it’s to Aradia hanging upside-down over the bunk railing and telling you it’s time for breakfast.

Her usually matted and filthy hair seems to have been washed, finally – it ripples in waves down to her knees as you follow her out to the cafeteria. “Where were you and Sollux yesterday?” you manage to ask around your sleep-deadened tongue.

Aradia shrugs and doesn’t turn to look at you. “They took me along with Sollux. Did they tell you he got the spinal ports installed? Anyway, they _said_ it was for Sollux’s ‘emotional benefit’ and tried saying some bullshit about how having a familiar face would help stabilize him faster, but truthfully—” She pauses to peek inside one of the training rooms before marching on. “Truthfully, it was more like a hostage situation. The Crew thinks if I’m there, Sollux won’t, like… blow things up. Something like that, anyway.”

Yesterday, Feferi had tried to explain to you and Rose what exactly a “spinal port” was, but all you understood was that it had to do with starships and electrokinesis, and it’s something Sollux has apparently been groomed for his entire life. _A Helmsman,_ Feferi called it. She hadn’t sounded happy about it. “So is Sollux back now, too?”

Aradia’s pace slows. Her tattered skirt swishes like long grass. “He… had a bad reaction to the chemical dampeners. They didn’t want him, you know, _taking off_ in this thing while they were fitting him, right, so they suppressed his psionic pathways while they were installing the ports, only…” She finally glances back at you, worrying at her lip with her teeth. “He’s here at Prospit, yeah. Somewhere in the medical wing. We probably won’t see him for a few days. The old lady is flying in today, too.”

Your heart skips a beat. “Wait, what?” Aradia turns back away from you to navigate the hallways. You pick up your pace to catch back up. “You mean, like, Crocker? She’s coming here? Today? In person?”

Aradia nods and turns down the familiar hall to the cafeteria. “She can’t have her pilot-in-training die before he can even get installed in a Helm!” she says, falsely casual. “Plus, I think she’s going to be talking with the Crew about you and Rose. Maybe meet you, too. I don’t know for sure.”

A pit of dread forms in your stomach like a stone. You rub at your arms briefly to try and dissipate the chill bumps forming there. Rose. You have to talk to Rose.

Aradia pushes the swinging doors open. You ignore the trays of trademark orange mush and beeline straight to where Rose sits with Feferi at the far end of the table. “We have a problem,” you hiss in her ear before she can say hello.

Rose blinks at you in surprise, but something in your face seems to catch her attention. You don’t miss the way her eyes flick to Aradia, who’s saying hello to Tavros at the other side of the room and helping him collect a tray. “What sort of problem?”

“Crocker is on her way here. Right now.” You wonder, too late, if you should be saying this in front of Feferi, but you forge ahead anyway. “She’ll be here today.”

Rose goes very still. Feferi’s lips part in shock, and she quickly turns away to stare intently at her lap. “How do you know?” Rose finally asks, very quiet.

“Aradia told me.” You give her a quick rundown on where Aradia and Sollux have been.

When you finish, Rose fiddles thoughtfully with her spoon. “So we meet with her, then,” she says after a few moments of silence.

You gape at her. Your heart rate still hasn’t gone down; how can Rose be so calm about this? “We _meet_ with… Rose, this is our _enemy!_ We can’t let her get her claws in us, not for a minute, do you hear me? Do you want to end up like Sollux? Drugged up and burned out because she tried making you a weapon?”

“John, calm down—”

You jerk your head at Feferi. “Do you want to end up one of _them?_ ”

Feferi tips her head forward, hair obscuring her face.

Rose sets her spoon down, takes your hand, and jerks at it hard enough to throw you off balance.

You reel back, struggling to pull your hand away. “Wh… Rose, what the fuck?!”

“Calm _down_ and give me your hand.” Rose drags your resisting hand up to her ear. “Feel that.”

You’re on the verge of shouting about how _fucking weird it is to say that_ when you touch something – a delicate membrane, wet and alien.

You panic immediately. Wrenching your fingers out of Rose’s iron grip, you shove yourself backwards, landing on your ass and staring at Rose in absolute terror.

Most of the table ignores your episode, but you notice Vriska looking your way, curiosity written on the half of her face you can see.

“Rose, oh my god, what… Was that a…?”

“John. We cannot escape this. Not really. You need to understand that.” Rose pushes her hair back further, and you can see it now – a pale pink slit right in front of her ear, a thin gray growth beside it, the start of a translucent fin like Feferi’s. “Regardless of our feelings on the subject _now,_ we were irrevocably dealt this hand as children and it is not going away. Are you listening to me?”

You stare at the vestigial gill, pulsing in the open air, and you can’t bring yourself to say anything.

For the first time, you notice how gray Rose looks under the sterile fluorescent lights.

“Meeting with Crocker won’t do us any more harm than she has already caused us.” Rose lets her hair fall back into place. “Whether she wants to gloat, or wants us to perform, or… ‘evaluate’ for her, it will not change the fact that this thing, this _power_ , it is a _part_ of us, John. It _will_ progress and it _will_ change us, just as it has been doing for twelve years, and…” Her voice trails off, and she holds out a hand to help you up. You don’t take it and she lets it drop again.

You meet Vriska’s gaze. Her mismatched horns catch the sterile light, and even with the distance you can see the rough, scaly skin around her glasses’ darkened lens. It doesn’t take much for you to think of the empty, scabbed eye socket under it.

When Rose speaks again, it’s so quiet you can hear your heartbeat pounding in your ears. “We’re _going_ to end up like them one day, John, no matter what we do.”

You struggle to your feet and try to say “No we won’t,” but the only part that bubbles up is a choked “No,” before the rest of it dies somewhere in your chest. You abandon the cafeteria – it’s not like you’re hungry anyway, not for that neon copper mush with cobalt like rat poison.

Before you clear the table, something snags the back of your shirt. You skid to a stop before you hear anything rip, and spin around with more violence than you intended. For once in your life you’re _furious_ and you can’t pinpoint why. You come face to face with blood red glasses and a sharklike grin.

_“Follow the white rabbit,”_ Terezi says, the tip of her cane caught in the fabric of your shirt, and that makes _so_ little sense and you are unbelievably _done_ with this entire fucking place and now, _great,_ the entire fucking table is staring at the two of you in bewilderment and it’s not even like you asked for _any_ of this in the first goddamn place—

Terezi’s manic grin drills into your brain.

Something in the back of your mind _breaks_.

You snatch Terezi’s cane out of her hands, out of your clothes, and you snap it in half over your knee. It gives way and cracks like balsa wood.

The shards of it clatter to the floor and you don’t _run,_ not necessarily, but you storm out of the room only half noticing how the doors burst open before you with a fitful burst of air and slam shut without swinging behind you.

God, you want to _hit_ something.

You make for the nearest training gym, remembering the leather dummies Nepeta tore to shreds the other day. Your glasses are sliding sweat-slick down your nose and your hair into your eyes – when you reach up to push it away you swear you can feel the beginnings of _horns_ there, just under your skin, itching and wrong, and you have to curl your hands into fists just to stop yourself from tearing at your hair and

_There’s something in here with you._

You jerk around as something pale flashes away in the corner of your eye, something white… You’re _not_ crazy, you’re _not,_ you _saw_ it, no matter what Rose would read into it, and you’re _angry_ at her for reasons you can’t quite grasp, can’t quite remember, can’t quite reason out, can’t…

There it is again, white in the doorway, flitting away in your periphery and you chase it, slipping and stumbling in the hospital-white sterile halls. You chase it without thinking, you _can’t_ think, Terezi’s cackling voice drowning out everything in your head with her white rabbit white rabbit white rabbit white

You spot it at the end of the hall, something like white fur swishing around the corner and you _have_ to catch up to it, you have to _win,_ and you’re _angry._ You’re angry at Rose and you’re angry at Crocker. You’re angry at Dad for starting all this to begin with, years and years ago, and hell, you’re angry at Dave for not pulling you away when that drone came reaching for you; God, you’re so, _so_ angry at Dave and at white rabbits and at Terezi’s anglerfish teeth stretched in a wild grin.

You can hear someone, far off and familiar, but you ignore it because there it was again, clearer this time – a white tail vanishing around another corner. You’re gaining on it, stumbling and shoving against someone who won’t get out of the way; Rose, it’s Rose, she’s trying to apologize in that _way_ she does, making it seem like your fault anyway and why won’t she move, couldn’t she see it just around the corner?

There’s more voices echoing in your ears as you struggle against her; Vriska, there’s Vriska saying “psychotic break” and there’s Feferi, high-pitched and frantic asking _what what what_ and you finally, finally break away from Rose to dash down the hallway, heart in your throat because what if you missed it? But no, it’s there, flickering at the end of the hall by a door that’s always locked, sitting patient and opalescent and all but glowing neon white as it sits and waits for you, white as the fluorescent lights, white as rabbit bones bleached white in the sun…

Someone grabs at your shoulder and can’t they see it too, can’t they see? Part of you realizes that you’re shouting, that you’ve _been_ shouting and you’re vaguely curious what you’ve been saying but there’s a new voice, irritated and grown-up and unfamiliar, and you try to wrench yourself away because you _have_ to win, you _have_ to get to the white rabbit at the end of the hall, but the grown-up voice catches your arm again and there’s something shrieking in your ears and you think it might be you, at first, until you realize it’s a howling wind screaming through the corridor.

A sharp something pinches the back of your neck and the shrieking goes silent.

The white thing fades out of your vision and you realize something Important, so so Important.

~

At first, you dream about home.

It’s nothing special. You go down the stairs – there’s that one with the funny warped dip in the boards – and you can hear Dad in the kitchen. You say hello to him and he says “severe psychological duress” in someone else’s voice, which makes perfect sense to you.

There’s someone outside, you can hear them claiming that your roommate said you were stable this morning. You wonder who it is – Dave, probably. You should go let him inside.

Then you’re not dreaming about home anymore.

Somewhere far below you is a sprawling golden city built in sharp-shadowed light, like a movie set, like the surface of the moon.

You’re falling into it.

You struggle against the pull of gravity, fighting a rising tide of panic. How did you get here? Why are you falling?

There are people down there, dream-people with no faces or features, looking up to watch you fall, pointing up with slender hands that you should be too far away to see. You’re close enough to see the spikes on golden cathedrals, and you wonder if you’d impale yourself on one, if you…

If

_this isn’t real_

~

Heart pounding, you jerk awake in a bed. You blink at the fuzzy fluorescents above you and try to breathe, and your first inane thought is _where the hell are my glasses?_

Your second, less inane thought has to do with realizing your hands are restrained to your bed rail.

“Fantastic job,” Sollux lisps at you from another bed. You jump and struggle to turn your head enough to squint in his direction. “Your very first mental collapse. Congratulations on that, by the way. If it’s any consolation, it could’ve gone a lot worse.”

You try to swallow past your dry throat. “I… what?”

“I mean, you didn’t try to maim or murder anyone. That’s a plus.” _Pluth,_ he pronounces it.

“Has that… happened before?”

“All the time. When Karkat was eleven he punched out half my teeth, see?” You blink fuzzily at Sollux and pretend you can see what he’s talking about. “And Terezi’s blind, and Vriska’s missing an eye, and Kanaya has this _massive_ scar on her stomach, and Tavros…”

You’ve stopped listening, struggling to recall memories – you remember the white thing, and there was something Important you knew about it, but you can’t for the life of you remember what it was.

“So did TZ ever tell you what I told her to say?” Sollux asks.

You blink and squint at him again. Your wrist restraints are starting to cut off your circulation, and you mindlessly twist your hands trying to get blood flow back. “TZ?… Wait, _you_ told Terezi to say that?”

_White rabbit,_ you hear her again, like she’s setting up the punch line of a joke with a cackle bubbling just under the surface.

But it wasn’t a rabbit, was it?

Your memory is fuzzy, but you remember its tail, swishing around the corner – but rabbits don’t have tails that swish, do they? You start to realize they’ve probably drugged you with something.

“Did she?”

Right, Sollux. “She said… something about a white rabbit?”

“Yeah, that was it. Now can you tell me what the fuck that means?”

“What?” You tug at your wrist restraints again. “I have no idea. You tell me.”

“Yeah, cause that’s what your friend said. I’m just the message middleman here.”

Friend? Rose?

“I got a reply yesterday. From the account you mentioned. Turntech whatever.”

Your heart skips a beat.

_Dave?_

Dave said to follow the white rabbit?

It makes sense, in some weird way – _The Matrix_ is the only movie you’ve both been able to agree on as unquestionably awesome. And, right, there was that time he sent you the stuffed bunny from Con Air as an “ironic” birthday gift last year.

But what the hell is he trying to say?

You blink at the out-of-focus lights and try to reason it out.

So they saw the message.

They presumably read at least _some_ of the files.

They realized Sollux’s Pesterchum was the only way to contact you, and that they could only use code.

Collectively, they decided to send you… _Follow the white rabbit._

You grind your teeth against the fog in your head.

“Dude, chill. They’re gonna knock you out again if they think you’re about to flip your shit again.”

You realize how tight you’re pulling against your restraints and force yourself to relax.

Sollux doesn’t talk again until someone named Crowbar comes to let you out.

~

Aradia doesn’t mention your episode once, a fact for which you’re immensely grateful. Instead, she chatters about amusing stories from the past while she leads you back from the medical wing.

“…so then _Deuce_ tried to break it up, but he’s like, five-foot-nothing, ninety pounds soaking wet, and he’s also absolutely _terrified_ of practically everybody.” She talks nonstop as you follow her out of the medical wing. “Anyway, long story short, Eridan and Sollux don’t talk anymore, and also Deuce got transferred into the paperwork department. Except he’s _terrible_ at paperwork, and he replaced their only _competent_ guy – we call him Droog, you might meet him soon, he does evaluations sometimes – and _he’s_ still pissed about that but he basically just has to do what they say.” Aradia stops abruptly at a juncture in the halls. “Hey, do you want dinner? There might still be some left.”

You’re still shaking off the sedative, but your dulled senses are still reminding you that you haven’t eaten all day, so you shrug and nod. Aradia smiles brightly and springs back into step down the left corridor. You trail after her, absently rubbing the Velcro marks on your wrists, and you can’t help taking surreptitious glances around, half-hoping to see a white tail vanish around a corridor.

As Aradia leads you to the cafeteria doors and pushes them open for the second time today, it finally hits you.

The Important thing you forgot.

That wasn’t a rabbit.

It was a _dog._

You push past Aradia into the cafeteria, hoping, and yes, there’s Rose, still here at the far end of the table, inspecting something Kanaya holds out in her cupped hands.

You have to tell her.

As you pass Karkat, he jolts and turns to stare at you in bewilderment and alarm. “Egbert, what the fuck?” he hisses as you pass, pupils contracted as he presumably takes in your emotional state, and you ignore him because _you have to tell Rose._

She sees you coming and concern clouds her face. “John, did they already—”

“Becquerel.”

Her mouth shuts. Opens again. Slowly closes. Cautiously opens again. “B…ecquerel?”

Kanaya watches the both of you intently.

“Becquerel. I saw Becquerel. Here, in Prospit.”

Rose is examining your face with her Therapist Face on, and when she goes to speak it’s with a careful, nonthreatening tone. “John, why do you think Jade’s dog is here?”

You bite your tongue hard to suppress a wave of frustration. “Rose, listen. Sollux got a reply back from Dave. He’s in the medical wing. I talked to him, he said he got a reply from Dave’s account.”

Rose says nothing. Just watches you with mild concern.

You take a deep breath and organize your thoughts through the haze lingering in your head. “All it said was to follow the white rabbit.”

That finally prompts a reaction. “He… sent you a Matrix quote?”

“I mean, it probably wasn’t _just_ Dave, but yeah. And that was this morning, before I saw Bec. It makes sense.”

It does, doesn’t it?

Rose looks at Kanaya, and why is she doing _that_ all of a sudden? “I’m not sure—” she begins.

A crackle from somewhere above interrupts her. Everyone along the table looks up as a calm male voice comes over an invisible speaker in the ceiling. “Code six-twelve. All units are required to collect in mess hall. Faculty are to follow Skaia Procedures. Code six-twelve. Repeat, all units collect in mess hall, and faculty are to follow Skaia Procedures.”

With another crackle, the speakers go silent.

“What’s code six-twelve?” you ask Kanaya because she’s the closest.

She regards you impassively. “It means there has been a breach in the facility. Usually it simply means there has been minor structural damage somewhere. Last time, it was a broken window.” She narrows her eyes just the slightest bit at you. “With your earlier activities, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

The swinging doors open and Eridan stumbles in, hair flat on one side like he’s just woken up.

“And the Skaia Procedures?” Rose prompts.

Kanaya shrugs. “A set of protocols the faculty set in place after the incidents at Skaia. I honestly don’t know much more than that, the faculty are fairly tight-lipped.”

You remember what Sollux said earlier about Kanaya’s scarred stomach. You wonder if that happened during this mysterious Skaia Incident.

The doors swing open again, this time to Feferi, damp hair dragging on the floor behind her, leaving a shiny trail like a snail. The doors swing shut, but burst open an instant later to Equius, who hauls in a very unhappy-looking Nepeta by her green coat collar.

“… _not_ going to sit down!” she’s saying, clearly put out by having to be in the cafeteria at all. “AC wants to see what’s happening!”

“You will do no such thing whilst _She_ is still here.” Equius practically carries her to the table, and you know enough about Nepeta to know that the instant he lets go of her, she could be out the swinging doors. But she _lets_ him put her at the table and she frowns, she squirms, she whines, but she stays.

The rest of the Zodiac Project trickle in until only Sollux is missing. Terezi is the last to enter, tapping a bright red – and clearly brand new – cane in front of her, and when the swinging doors close behind her you hear them click.

You accidentally make eye contact with Karkat, who is still watching you wide-eyed and bewildered. You wonder what he’s hearing from you in the midst of this cacophony of emotions.

“So what do we do now?” you ask Rose, but Kanaya answers.

“We don’t do anything. Regardless of what they’re trying to repair out there, the Crew will have eyes on us.” She tilts her head at the ceiling, and it takes you a minute to realize she’s using her horns to gesture at the invisible speakers there. “We are not even supposed to talk to one another once the doors have been shut. Apparently our matron is still here at Prospit, convening with the Crew. It would be unwise to misbehave while She is still on the premises.” You can’t explain why you can hear her capitalize the word _She,_ but you can.

You chew your lip and are about to say something else when there’s a distant, muffled _boom_ somewhere far away.

Flecks of dust fall from the ceiling.

The entire table looks up, confused. You see Vriska push her glasses up, squinting at the air vent with her one good eye.

Rose cuts into your thoughts, light and casual. “One more question, if you’d answer it, Kanaya?”

Kanaya dips her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug.

“Would they call a code six-twelve for strictly structural damage?” Rose’s eyes flick to yours for an instant, then back to Kanaya. “Or would it apply for a… security breach, as well?”

The realization of what she’s getting at hits you like a punch to the face.

They’re here.

They’re trying to get you out.

That’s why they told you to follow Becquerel.

_Because they’re here._

There’s another crash, much closer than the first, and a sound like ripping plywood, grainy and crunching.

Halfway down the table, Karkat stands up, fear etched in jaundiced eyes.

There’s a beat of silence as you all realize something is about to happen.

Then Aradia screams like she’s being murdered, and the far wall explodes inward.

The shockwave sends you to the floor as a wave of concrete dust chokes you. You cough and register sirens going off, alarms and flashing lights everywhere, filtering blood red through the dust, red as Terezi’s glasses, and something white cuts through the chaos like a knife.

Your vision grays out for a few seconds. You vaguely realize you’ve hit your head on something. Probably the concrete floor. You wonder, distant and unconcerned, if you’re bleeding – but then your vision clears and the world comes back in focus.

It’s like a scene from a shitty movie, you guess, the way you see Jade leaping through the imploded wall like Lara Croft, a rifle on one arm, the other buried in a handful of blinding white fur.

Becquerel is no longer the ethereal White Rabbit you remember – he’s a _beast,_ snarling and slavering and massive, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jade. You can only stare, dazed and bruised and unable to look away from the dog’s neon eyes burning like uranium through the clouds of dust.

Jade is shouting, running with Becquerel into the cafeteria, but between the ringing in your ears and the shrieking sirens, you can’t hear her voice, but you gasp her name out into the dust anyway and Bec’s ears snap in your direction.

You realize, distantly, that no one around you is getting up. The table is on its side fifteen feet away, Feferi pinned unmoving underneath it.

“Feferi,” you try to choke out through your seizing lungs, but you can’t even hear yourself say it.

Your vision grays out again. This time it scares you.

Becquerel half-drags Jade across the room and when she sees you her face drains of color. She shouts something else at the hole in the wall and – Dave, you see Dave come through it, sword in hand, Dirk right behind him and then Roxy emerges through the dust, rifle in hand and _angry_ in a way that frightens you, in some deep primal part of your brain.

And –

Jade’s hefting her rifle aside and kneeling beside you, her other hand gripping a fistful of Bec’s fur like her life depends on it, and _you couldn’t care less_ because you can see him there, sprinting past Dirk and Roxy –

Your vision clouds with sudden tears. It’s okay. It’s okay because Dad is here to get you, and Roxy has her rifle trained on the doors with rage in her eyes, and Becquerel snarling with snapping static in his fur like an avenging angel, and Dave, _Dave,_ you can’t see him but you can hear him, just barely through the dust, shouting that he’s found Rose, and you’re rocked with the realization that you are finally, _finally_ being rescued.

When Dad leans down over you, anxiety and fear in every line on his face, all you can do is reach up and sob out his name.

“John! John, look at me, look at me, it’s okay, we’re here, I’m here, look at me, okay? We’re going to get you out.” He looks over at Jade and Becquerel. “Go get Rose, I’ve got him!”

“Grandpa says they’ve woken up the staff drones.” But Jade stands up anyway, gun back at the ready. “They’re on their way, we have to get them in the King and go!”

“I know, Jade, _go!_ ”

Turning your head is a struggle, for some reason. Feferi hasn’t moved from under the steel table, and it might be your imagination but you think you can see something dark and slick spreading over the concrete-coated floor. You convince yourself it’s her hair and nothing more.

You can hear someone struggling to breathe nearby, cutting off in a choked gurgle with each inhale. You think it might be Eridan, but you’re not sure.

When Dad pulls you upright, the world swerves so violently that you almost go right back down. Something hot drips a trail down the back of your neck. You hope it’s just sweat. Dad catches you as your vision unclouds and you struggle to regain your balance, and that’s when you hear Karkat.

“You can’t.”

You freeze, searching the ground, Dad’s grip on you going iron-tight.

There he is, blood flowing freely from long gouges across his chest that have torn through the thin fabric of his shirt, staring you down with anger in every quivering jaw muscle he clenches against the pain.

“James!” Jake Harley appears in the destroyed wall, yet another gun in his hands. “Drones en route! Get everyone back in, we have to go!”

You let Dad pull you away from the bleeding boy on the floor.

Becquerel barks, once, sharp enough to make you wince, and you turn to see his ears pricked at the locked swinging doors.

Panic wells up in your chest. “Dad…”

“I know, John.”

“Dad, they’re coming!”

“I know.”

Jade takes her hand off of Bec to flick the safety off on her rifle.

Roxy lifts a limp Rose in her arms, her own gun abandoned on the floor, and you’re terrified, because _something_ is coming through those doors and _it is going to kill them._

Dave whips around to face the doors, and when he shouts, even you can hear it over the blaring sirens.

“GO!”

Roxy sprints for the wall, Rose clutched tight in her arms.

Dirk dives after them, shielding them both from flying debris as something kicks the swinging doors in. They fly off their hinges and skid ten feet into the room with a horrific metal shriek.

The panic in your chest fades, to be replaced by a cold, horrified dread.

Something whirrs beyond the doors, then the spiked silhouette you remember from Houston, from the tunnel, from your goddamn _nightmares,_ shoves its way inside.

Three drones, somehow even more massive than you remember, muscle their way inside. Against the far wall, you see Vriska stagger to her feet, gushing blood from her shoulder, and she’s looking straight at you, mouthing something, wheezing, the sirens drowning out her words, but then she points to the center of the room and you realize, too late.

Time skids and scrapes to a halt as you _all_ realize, too late. You see horror flood Dirk’s face as it hits him.

As the drones loom over Dave, who stands alone with a single sword raised.

The sirens cut out, abruptly, leaving the room as silent and cold as a grave.

Dirk and Roxy are stumbling back to their feet. Too far away to help him.

Jade raises her gun, but Becquerel whips around and they’re both gone, vanished in a flash of green light.

Dad takes half a step back, and you can hear the moral battle in his head.

The instant he hesitates is an instant too long.

The first drone lashes out, too big to move that fast, and Dave’s sword clatters to the concrete floor as the enormous thing locks its metal hand around his chest.

“Dave!” Dirk screams from somewhere. You twist to look for him – he’s running, sword raised.

Gamzee Makara beats him there.

He appears out of nowhere, a lean snarling shadow that somehow jumps from the floor to the drone’s enormous shoulders.

The thing doesn’t have time to react. With a screech of shearing metal, Gamzee rips its head off.

It collapses – but it doesn’t go limp like the rest had. It _spasms,_ like a dying insect, curling up and clenching like it’s having a seizure, and you can hear Dave start to wheeze as its hand tightens around his chest.

Gamzee disappears and the other two drones fall headless too, twitching.

_“Dave!”_

The drone convulses one last time, and you hear something _crack._

The moment hangs in silence for what feels like an eternity.

Then Dave starts screaming.

It’s not like you’ve never heard Dave yell before. You have. You’ve heard him holler down the hall at his brother during Skype calls. You’ve heard him shout into the phone when he called from somewhere loud. Hell, not two weeks ago you heard him raise his voice at Dirk in the car.

But you’ve never heard him scream in pain the way he does as Dirk hacks the drone’s limbs away and pulls him back, sword clattering to the ground. He’s trying to be gentle, you can tell, but Dave screams like he’s _dying_ and your chest is tight with the fear in it because for all you know, he is.

“James!” Roxy shouts from the hole in the wall. “C’mon!”

Dad half-carries you to the smoking concrete wreckage. The way you shake has nothing to do with your concussion.

There’s a whirring helicopter outside. Jake is inside it, flicking switches with one hand, semi-automatic in the other. He looks up when Dave’s screams reach over the roar of the rotors, anxiety etching new lines into his face, as Dad pushes you into the cabin.

“Where’s Dave?” Jake yells over the noise.

Dad points.

“What happened?”

“Drone got him. Dirk’s bringing him. Where’s Jade and Bec?”

“Back here!” Jade’s voice drifts from the back of the cabin. “Grandpa, can you get him off me?”

You struggle to turn again and see her, pinned to the floor by Becquerel’s enormous paw. His ears are flat and his hackles raised.

“Bec! Get down!”

Becquerel bares his teeth but lets Jade up.

Roxy climbs into the cab, setting Rose on the metal floor. “Fire it up, Jake! Dirk’s right behind me!”

“Rose?”

“She’s breathing, she’ll be fine, get us going!”

Jake turns back to the controls and starts turning switches again.

Dirk finally emerges into the sunlight, Dave in his arms. Dave isn’t screaming anymore. He isn’t even moving.

Jake waits until Dirk is inside the cab and pulls a lever. The floor jolts as the helicopter rises into the air, the rotors whining so loudly you can’t hear what Roxy shouts to Dirk.

Dad slams the cab door shut and the cab goes surprisingly quiet. “Dirk, is he breathing?”

Dirk doesn’t reply, white-faced, setting Dave on the metal floor and checking his pulse.

“Dirk!”

“James, _shut the fuck up!_ ” Roxy dumps her rifle in Dad’s hands and kneels beside Dave.

Your vision grays out.

When it clears, you’re on the floor, Jade supporting your head and shining something bright in your eyes.

“…cussion, his eyes are doing that thing,” she’s calling to Jake. “Do we still have the medikit in here?”

You can’t hear what Jake shouts back, but Jade leaps to the side of the cab and starts fumbling with a box. You’re conscious of Dad hovering over you, putting pressure on something that stings on the back of your head.

Dirk and Roxy’s voices drift into focus.

“…least three shattered, might have flail chest, I don’t know.”

“Listen to his breathing, the biggest issue right now is if he’s bleeding into his lungs.”

“I can’t fucking _hear_ his breathing, Roxy!”

“Dirk, either calm the fuck down _right now_ or I’m throwing you out of this goddamn chopper!”

“I… he wasn’t coughing, we’ll assume there’s no bleeding, what next?”

“He’s… he’s probably in shock?”

“Maybe, but we can’t fucking _do_ anything for that!”

“Jake!” Roxy’s voice cuts sharp through the rumbling cab. “What’s our ETA?”

“I’d say an hour before Bec can teleport us with any real accuracy. Just keep them all stable until then.”

You struggle to sit up, pushing Dad away when he tries to keep you down. “Rose?” you manage.

Jade reappears, handing a roll of gauze to your dad before dashing off again with a stethoscope.

Rose stirs and squints in the sunlight piercing through the cab windows, clearly disoriented, hair in her eyes.

“John, lie back down, you have a concussion.” Dad pulls at your shoulders, but there’s sick dread welling up in your mind that has nothing to do with the way Dave lies motionless, or with the dizzy ache in your head – you keep thinking of Karkat, bleeding, saying _“You can’t”_ like he’s trying to say something else that’s getting lost in his mind…

And you remember Kanaya’s voice like a death knell: _Apparently our matron is still here at Prospit, convening with the Crew. It would be unwise to misbehave while She is still on the premises._

You jerk away from Dad and stumble to your feet to look out the rear window, back at Prospit vanishing in the distance.

Becquerel follows your gaze, and the fur on his back rises up on end. He growls, low and menacing, as static starts to crackle in the air around him.

“John—”

“She’s there.” You try to swallow but your mouth is dry. “She was at Prospit when you came… She’s going to come after us.”

Roxy meets your eyes with slowly realizing horror.

Far behind you, something massive and red rises up.

It’s a _ship_ – there’s no other word for it, stark red and garish against the cloudless sky, curved to points at the front like an enormous pitchfork. It’s colossal, you can see even from here – like a skyscraper that learned how to fly. It lifts up like a dragonfly, too nimble for something so big to move, too fast to be real.

Roxy levels her rifle at the back window, but even you know a rifle is going to do exactly jack shit against Her.

“Jake,” Dad says, too calmly, _“go.”_

Becquerel whines, low in his throat, pleading and panicked, and you can see in his neon eyes that he doesn’t know what to do.

“Roxy, I need you down here.” Dirk is on the edge of panic.

“Dirk, she is _right there_ , I can’t…” Roxy says, but she wavers, her rifle lowering.

Jade slides into the copilot seat and fires off a string of technical jargon at her grandfather. The whine of the rotors rises.

It hits you and Bec first – some pulsing, angry shockwave in your mind that screams until it crowds out every thought in your brain.

It’s angry.

It’s screaming.

It’s in pain.

_You’re in pain._

_The walls of the ship around you are shrieking like an animal and digging into your spine like claws._

_Locked in place in pain._

_Lancing sharp through your brain in pulses that sting, and in waves that rip your neurons apart and your jaw locked shut and you can’t even scream, you can’t even thrash in the wires melding you spine-first into the hull of the ship._

Something howls.

The wave recedes and you’re jarred awake to the sound of alarms and panicked voices.

“I can’t get it back under control!”

“What did she do to the engine?”

“Nothing! It’s just… It’s not responding!”

Becquerel yowls again, shaking his head like a fly bit his ear – the static in his fur fizzles and pops like it’s shorting out.

“Are we gonna go down?”

“I don’t know, Roxy!”

Dad is clutching you to his side like a vise. You want nothing more than to shut your eyes and wait for everything to be quiet again, but every time you close them you can see into the ship again, where _something_ is chained to the hull and screaming in pain.

“Becquerel!”

The dog beside you whines and stumbles.

“Bec, you’ve gotta get us home!”

“Roxy, Dave’s not breathing!”

Becquerel plants his enormous paws on the metal floor and the world disappears in a flash of green light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp here we are at the official!!!halfway point of this story!
> 
> Chapters will be longer but slower now, so to fill the gaps between them, I'm going to start posting one- or two-shots that take place elsewhere in the story: about the Guardians, the Ancestors, the Skaia Incidents, etc. so be on the lookout for those.
> 
> As always I can be found at clitclip.tumblr.com and if you ask me practically anything about this story i will probably yell about it for ten minutes and then also cry so you can totally go do that.


	11. SHAKEDOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's getting harder to sleep.

When the world comes to a screeching halt, the first thing you do is vomit.

It’s really only to be expected, you realize later. What with the mind-numbing pain in your skull, the whirling screech of a sudden teleportation, and the general background of nauseating panic, it shouldn’t surprise you when you find yourself doubled over coughing up bile from your empty stomach. It does anyway. You’re vaguely relieved that you haven’t eaten all day.

Roxy and Dirk are shouting at each other again about how to move Dave, who apparently _is_ still breathing after all.

Your dad is shouting at both of them to be quiet.

Rose is struggling to sit upright, wincing at the light and noise, a hand going to her ear.

Jade is slumped sideways in the copilot chair, slowly stirring.

Jake is carefully picking her up, his gun slung over his shoulder, trying to talk over everyone.

And Bec is…

You blink through watering eyes and look around the cab.

He’s not here.

You want to feel concerned about that, but the part of your brain that cares about things is starting to shut down. It’s been a _really_ long day for you, and you can’t bring yourself to do anything as Dad slips an arm around your shoulders and carries you out of the helicopter.

~

You don’t remember much about getting to Jade’s home.

There’s Dad, of course, ever-present with his arms around you. You can hear his breath louder than anyone’s with your ear to his chest.

Rose walks with him, asking the occasional quiet question that doesn’t quite translate in your brain.

There’s some soft outdoorsy noises, too – birds chirping and twigs snapping and leaves rustling, and after the cold clinical world of Prospit, it sounds like _home._

Then the noises are gone and you’re somewhere that echoes, bright bare bulbs humming overhead and a strange organic smell to everything – like motor oil and wet dog and pumpkins and sawdust, and then Jade in your face, snapping her fingers and ordering you awake. There’s a tiny smear of blood under her nose, like she’d wiped it away too fast.

Roxy yells from somewhere up above. “Jake, what’s your medical equipment look like?”

“Third floor,” Jake yells back from somewhere much closer. “It’s not much, but it should suffice for now.”

Jade presses at the back of your head, hard enough to make you yelp and smack at her hand, but she smacks yours back and tells you to be quiet. “Also, James, don’t let him sleep for another hour. After that, wake him up every thirty minutes.”

“Bec?” you finally manage to croak. Your throat kind of burns. Jade frowns at you until you repeat the question. “Bec… where is he?”

“Probably somewhere around the island,” she says casually, but you don’t miss the way her eyes flick to her grandpa. “He doesn’t stay in the lab a lot.” She pauses, and finally slips her arms around your shoulders and buries her face in your shoulder. “We were so worried about you,” she mumbles against your shirt. “Dave was the worst. He literally _did not shut up_ the entire time.”

That tugs a snicker out of you. “What a nightmare,” you say, realizing too late how bitter you sound, but Jade either doesn’t notice or pretends not to. She hands your dad a bottle of painkillers and crosses the room to talk to Rose.

You take a look around the room. You’ve seen Jade’s house before, when she would Skype with you or send you pictures, but never the whole thing. It looks vaguely like the inside of a water tower, round and metal-walled with sparse furnishings. Stacks of crates – supplies, you think – line the walls. One wall curves up and away in a spiral staircase that you assume goes all the way up the tower, like a lighthouse.

Dad hands you two ibuprofen and a bottle of water. “We should have gotten there sooner,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry, John.”

You shrug and knock back the pills. “It wasn’t all that bad. Where’s Rose? We need to… to tell you about it.” You turn to look for her, but she’s disappearing up the spiral stairs with a swish of her skirt.

“Don’t worry about that, we’ll get the details later. Everyone needs to rest for now. We’re safe here. We have time.”

Something twists unpleasantly in your chest that has nothing to do with your concussion. “What are we going to do next?”

Dad stares at you, bewildered. “What do you mean?”

“I mean… what are we going to do next?” The gauze strip Jade tied around your head itches, but you resist the urge to prod it. “Should we go back and try to get the Zodiac kids? We could try to disable her ship too. There’s something on board there I think she’s trying to protect, Feferi called it a Helmsman, we could get it and—”

“John, stop, stop. We aren’t _doing_ anything.” You open your mouth to argue, but Dad cuts you off. “ _Yet._ We’re not doing anything _yet,_ okay? What we _are_ going to do is take it easy for a few days and then see what we _can_ do.”

You shut up and nod, but your brain is still going a mile a minute. You’ll run some ideas by Jade and Dave later – Rose probably has her own ideas too…

“How is he?” Dad asks Roxy, who’s just appeared around the staircase.

She shrugs, shoulders slumping. “Not great. Four broken ribs, fractured collarbone… We can’t find any internal bleeding, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. We can’t give him anything narcotic ‘cause that’d slow his breathing down, so we’re just hoping he doesn’t wake up until we find the right painkillers.”

“Dirk?”

“Panicking. What do you expect?”

“Keep an eye on him.”

“Yeah, I know. Jake’s up there with both of ‘em. Y’know. Seeing as he’s the only one here with anything approaching _actual_ medical expertise.”

Rose comes back down the stairs, white-faced.

There’s a flash of light and a weird _vvvvip_ and Jade appears in the middle of the room, blinking at everyone and looking slightly astonished. “Huh. I wasn’t expecting that to work. That’s convenient.” She bounds off the platform she appeared on and slips past Roxy to yell up the stairs. “Grandpa! The transportalizer works!”

Grandpa Harley’s voice drifts down. “It does?”

“Yeah, it just got unplugged from the core, it should be okay now.”

While Jade and her grandpa chatter about the transportalizer – a conversation which quickly devolves into technical jargon you can’t decipher – Rose comes up and carefully sits beside you. You haven’t heard her say a word since Prospit’s wall collapsed, now that you think about it. She shakes her hair forward a bit and gives you an uneasy look, one hand at her ear, and it finally clicks – she doesn’t know how to tell her mom about her new gills.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Can we just… talk about Prospit? Soon?”

A furrow appears between his eyes. “If… you want to, soon. When Jake and Dirk come back downstairs. Why? What’s so important?”

You can’t help glancing at Rose, but she just sits and stares at the ground. “Just… some weird stuff happened,” you manage lamely. You’ll have to talk to Rose later alone.

Jade pops back down the stairs. “John, Rose? Can you guys come help me in the garden?”

~

Jade’s garden is on the top floor of the lab, an enormous round greenhouse with glass walls that look over the island. The jungle is a splash of vibrant green, and the dormant volcano rises up out of it like an impertinent middle finger to the sky.

“So.” Jade hefts up a watering can to water a plant pot hanging from a hook in the ceiling. “Tell me everything.”

You shrug and follow her, unsure of what you’re supposed to be doing. “I have wind powers and Rose grew gills. Don’t tell her mom.”

Jade snickers and digs a basket out of a pile of plant pots. “Here, go pick some tomatoes. We still have to eat tonight. Rose, do you really have gills?”

“Only vestigial ones, as far as I know, but yes.” Rose accepts her own basket. “Is Dave going to be okay?”

Jade’s face falls. She turns away and grabs a pair of secateurs. “I don’t know. Grandpa looked worried.” She snips a dead leaf off a nearby vine. “I mean, our medical equipment is… It’s better than _nothing,_ but I don’t know if it’s enough.”

“What do you mean?” Rose scoops up a bit of leaf litter and deposits it in a planter.

“Well, Grandpa’s a volunteer rescue pilot for the Australian coast guard. That’s how we got the helicopter. And the island. We’re _technically_ a rescue outpost, but nobody ever needs rescuing all the way out here, so we don’t do much.” Jade wipes some condensation off the window. “That’s why we have a medical stock, too. But we’re not _nearly_ equipped enough to handle anything serious like this. And we can’t take him to the mainland, obviously.”

You find a tomato plant and start picking the ripe ones. “I think he’ll be fine,” you say, as much to reassure Rose as yourself.

Jade hums and clips a few sprigs of basil to put in her basket.

“So did your grandfather ever tell you about your telekinesis?” Rose says.

Jade snorts. “Yeah, but trust me, I found out way before that.”

“You… did?”

“My Grandpa can’t keep secrets to save his life.” She smirks and turns the basil pot to get more of the sunlight streaming through the glass walls. “He always pretended Bec was the one knocking things over whenever I got upset. And Bec and I would just look at each other like, _are you shitting me,_ but by then it was just easier to go along with it.”

You stare at her in confusion. “And you never like… thought that was weird?”

“What, telekinesis? No, not really.”

Well, if there’s one thing you know about Jade Harley, it’s that she’s _smart._ Smarter than you, definitely. Smarter than Dave, who taught you the basics of string theory last year, and smarter than Rose, who half-translated the language of some eldritch ocean horror with nothing but fuzzy dreams and a handmade grimoire. It shouldn’t surprise you that she’d take something as mundane as telekinesis in stride just as easily as flying a helicopter or repairing a teleporter, but it somehow does. You shake your head and go back to picking tomatoes.

~

You all gather on Floor 4. Jade told you it was the closest thing they had to a “living room,” so that’s where you find yourself sitting and telling a concerned group of adults about your experiences at Prospit.

“…but then they took Sollux for something called a, a – what was it, Rose? Something about fitting spine ports, or whatever? And they took Aradia too. Later she told me it was kind of a hostage thing, so if Sollux tried anything while he was outside Prospit, they’d have her to punish him with.” You take a sip of the tea Jade gave you and let Rose take over.

“While he was gone, there was no one watching the Pesterchum account, so we got your message a day late. By then, something had gone wrong with Sollux, and he’d been brought back to Prospit for medical care. His issues drew Crocker’s attention, and she’d flown in – partly to ensure Sollux would survive, and partly, I’m told, to ask the caregivers about John and I.” Rose sips her own tea.

“But you did eventually get the message?” Mom Lalonde exchanges a frown with Dirk, who doesn’t seem to be paying much attention at all. He stares at the door where Dave sleeps in the next room. He still hasn’t woken up.

“Sollux had Terezi pass it on to John.” Rose’s gaze flicks to meet yours for an instant. You can tell she doesn’t want to be the one to tell them about your little episode. “It… hmm. It came a little late. _I_ didn’t see Becquerel at all.”

“And _I_ just thought I was going insane,” you mumble into your mug. “I _did_ try to follow him, though. But I think the Crew stopped me. I don’t really remember much of what happened.” You don’t miss the way Jake and your dad look at one another anxiously.

“We were still trying to decode what had happened when you showed up.” Rose sets her empty mug on the scratched coffee table. “I’m not sure if any of the Zodiac children survived besides Sollux, but if they did, we would do well to try and contact—”

A choked rasp interrupts her from the open door. Dirk disappears in an instant with Jake right behind him, and you hear him talking quickly, soothingly, while you all follow more carefully.

Dave is sitting upright and coughing – or trying to, each hack cutting short in a gasp of pain. Dirk hovers over him, hand on his shoulder, trying to ease him back down. “Dave, Dave, listen to me, okay? You’re gonna be okay, just—Dave, shh, look at me…”

“Wh-the fuck?” Dave gasps out between shallow breaths.

“Just breathe. Okay? I know it hurts, just breathe.”

“I _can’t_ —”

“Yes you _can._ It’s just broken ribs. You’ll live, okay? Dave, c’mon, one deep breath.”

Without his shades, you can see Dave’s eyes wide with pain. It sends a sick shiver of worry down your spine. When you feel for the air currents, you can hear them stuttering and shaking through Dave’s lungs, rattling like shutters on an empty house.

“Dirk. Move.” Jake shoos him away, syringe in hand.

“You _said_ no narcotics!” Dirk hisses, but backs away anyway.

“He’s in too much pain to _breathe,_ Dirk, we’re going to pick our battles here!”

No one talks for a minute, and then finally, you hear Dave draw a deep, shaky breath. Tension unravels in your chest at the sound.

“Dave. Hey.” Dirk leans back down. “You okay?”

Dave coughs, once, shallow and clear. “I’m… fucking _high,_ you just gave a middle schooler _drugs,_ what the hell is _wrong_ with you—”

“Oh my god, shut up before I break your other ribs.” But Dirk is smiling, the tightness in his shoulders easing, and you feel the air settle as everyone in the room relaxes. “All things considered, I am a goddamn paragon of parenting and we all _know_ it.”

Dave breathes a shallow laugh, then turns serious. “Did we… we get them? John and Rose?”

“Present and accounted for,” Rose pipes up from behind you in the doorway. “But you’re wrecking our casualty average, Dave, we might need to cut you from the team.”

“Can you _not_ snark at me when I’m on heavy painkillers, shit’s not f-fair.”

Rose smiles, the first you’ve seen in days, like the sun breaking through clouds.

Jake turns to Dirk, but speaks loud enough for you to hear. “Keep someone with him at all times. We can all take shifts.”

“We’ll sleep in here!” Jade announces brightly. “It’ll be fun, right? Like a sleepover!” She nudges you with her elbow.

_Except with more traumatic injuries and terror_ , you think, but decide it’s better not to say that out loud. “Sure,” you say instead.

~

You and Rose don’t sleep that night.

You keep careful mental tabs on the threads of air in Dave’s lungs the entire time, too paranoid to let go, even as you listen to Rose’s quiet stories about her old cat.

“…decided to just _run,_ for absolutely no reason, directly into the shower. Full throttle, mad dash, full steam ahead.” Rose is perched teetering on the edge of her fragile cot, smiling down at you in a sleeping bag on the floor. “Of course, she screamed, so I came running thinking there was a murderer in the house. That I would be forced to defend myself and my poor cat from certain death.”

“What about your mom?” you find yourself asking before stifling a yawn.

“I was sure she was already done for.” Rose giggles. Rose never giggles. “So I burst in the door, violin in hand – it was the largest thing in reach at the time that wasn’t made of _yarn,_ John, shut up – and Jaspers comes shooting out of the bathroom, all four pounds of sopping wet kitten right at my face.”

“Did you die?”

“Yes, I did. Tragically. The coroner’s report: death by flying wet kitten, victim only twelve years old. She died a hero, _not_ emotionally scarred by seeing her mother naked in the shower after being attacked by a curious feline.”

“That’s gross, oh my god stop.”

“Why? Are you uncomfortable with imagining my mother naked?”

_“Rose I am going to smother you with this goddamn pillow.”_

She has to bury her face in her pillow to muffle her laughter.

The room goes quiet again, but for a ticking clock somewhere on this floor and for Jade’s gentle snoring in the corner. A few minutes pass, and you think Rose has finally gone to sleep until:

“How many of them do you think are still alive?”

You sit up and blink at her through the darkness. “What? The Zodiac kids?”

Her silhouette shrugs. “I don’t remember getting out of Prospit, John. I didn’t see.”

“Well… Sollux is okay, obviously, because he was in the medical wing. Gamzee lived, too. He killed the drones and left.”

“He did?”

“Mm-hm. Vriska, I think she survived, I remember her standing up and trying to get my attention, but she was covered in blood, so… I don’t know, after that.” You remember Feferi, pinned under twisted metal, limp as a dead fish with something slick and black pooling around her. “Everyone else I’m not really sure about.”

“What if some of them died? Like Kanaya or Feferi?” Rose flips her pillow over and smooths out the creases. “What if our parents _knew_ they might die, and came to get us anyway? Do you think that’s why they don’t want to talk about them?”

You don’t answer.

Dave keeps breathing.

~

The next day, Jade teams up with your dad to make pancakes for breakfast while Roxy and Dirk poke at Jake’s ancient TV, trying to make it work.

“…you are _not_ going to need a welding torch, Lalonde, I swear.”

“Well if _you_ knew how to fix the stupid thing, why haven’t you _done_ it already, you enormous pissbaby?”

“I’m _working_ on—Jesus Christ, is that a glue gun?”

“I know what I’m doing, Dirk!”

“Oh my _god_ —”

You pick at your food and let their bickering distract you from the ache in your skull and Jake’s conspicuous absence. Jade had said he was outside looking for Becquerel.

“He’s probably just spooked by having so many new people here,” she’d told you cheerfully, with a bucktoothed grin that didn’t reach her eyes. “He’ll come back when he’s lonely enough.”

And you had smiled back and said something about catching a dolphin as a peace offering, and Jade had laughed, but privately you still don’t think Jake is going to find him.

“—should be on right now, it’s got power and everything.” Dirk glares at the blank TV screen like he’s plotting revenge. “It _should_ be on,” he repeats.

“Well, did you fuck it up?” Roxy asks like she’s asking a toddler. “Maybe the pixels are bad. … _All_ of the pixels.”

“I didn’t fuck it up, _you_ probably did with that goddamn hot glue gun—”

The screen pops to life, hissing with age and disuse.

Rose goes very still at the table beside you.

On the couch across the room, what little color Dave still had drains from his face.

“Dirk.” Roxy’s voice is calm and even. “Go get James.”

“For what?” Dirk stares, bewildered, from his place behind the set. “Is it on?”

“Go get James right now.”

Dirk leans around the TV to look at the screen, then leaves at what could be called a run.

“John,” Rose whispers.

“I know,” you say with some difficulty. Your mouth has gone suddenly dry.

“The rebranding.”

“Yeah.”

The TV screen is a flat, blinding white, with a vivid red logo shaped like a pitchfork. In garish red text, a message slowly scrolls across the bottom.

 

PLEASE STAND BY

YOUR NEW EMPRESS WILL ADDRESS YOU SHORTLY

VIOLENCE WILL NOT CONTINUE

PLEASE STAND BY

 

Your dad appears in the doorway with Dirk right behind him, white-faced and looking at the TV like he would at a coiled snake. Jade is right on their heels, patting flour off her hands. “What’s happening?”

Roxy takes a too-casual step back from the screen. “Jade, do you know where your grandpa would be? I think he should get his ass back inside for this.”

Jade nods once and disappears down the spiral stairs.

~

No matter which channel Roxy clicks to, the vivid red text stays the same.

But the moment Jake walks through the door, the screen changes, going first to snow and static, and then to—

Magenta lips and magenta eyes, skin bleached gray and hair stained black, copper-orange horns curving away from her skull – she looks like Feferi, but with so much less kindness in her manic needle-toothed grin.

“Good evening,” she says, crackling through the ancient TV. “I’d like to thank each and every one of you out there for allowing the CrockerCorp rebranding expansion to take place with the least amount of resistance. I know it must have been difficult, but you all managed! Especially all you in Australia. Give yourselves a hand.”

The camera pans out and your stomach plummets. She stands in front of a very familiar ship, garish red and massive, curving to points at the front like a devil’s pitchfork.

But the ship doesn’t concern you nearly as much as the bone-white dog with neon green eyes that sits at her side, a heavy steel muzzle clamping his mouth shut. He stares at the ground and doesn’t look up.

“Bec?” Jade’s voice breaks.

“The next step in our journey to stardom,” Crocker continues on the screen, “is to the stars themselves. As your Empress, it is my duty and sincere pleasure to search out new life to bring under my rule, and new planets to colonize, with every _tool_ at my disposal.” Her gray, clawed hand comes down to rest on Bec’s collar. His ears go back, but he stays frozen.

“She’s going to take Becquerel?” Jake whispers, horrified.

“But don’t get complacent!” Crocker laughs. “I leave this planet in the _very_ capable hands of my subordinates. You all had better behave while I’m gone! They’re not nearly as _nice_ as me.”

You think of Vriska saying just those words and shiver.

“There is so much work to do,” she goes on, magenta lips stretched in a grotesque grin that’s starting to nauseate you. “There are new things to be found”—her hand visibly tightens on Becquerel’s steel collar—“lost things to be reclaimed”—Rose touches her ear without seeming to notice—“and owned things to be… _maintained.”_ She looks at the garish red ship behind her with what can only be called fondness.

You realize you’re holding your breath and force an exhale.

“Welcome to your new Empire,” she says to the camera, and the screen goes to static.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i should just rename this fic "Prayer Circle For Dave Strider" huh


	12. BREAKDOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave stops breathing one night.

That night, Dave stops breathing.

It’s only for a minute or two, as far as you can tell. Roxy was the one sitting up with him, and within seconds she’d called Jake down and flicked on the lights, jarring you out of an uneasy sleep. The yelling and commotion was over before you’d even really had a chance to wake up.

It happens at 2:38 AM. At 2:40, there’s an impromptu meeting about it.

“He’s bleeding into his lungs.” Jake rubs his eyes, looking frustrated and tired. You know you’re imagining it, but there seems to be more gray in his hair than there was yesterday. “He’s been bleeding for two days. Probably from… rib fragments, I suppose. If—when he wakes up again he’ll start coughing up blood.”

“So what do we do?” Dirk is white-faced and doesn’t look like he’ll ever sleep again.

“There’s not much we _can_ do. Give him antibiotics to stave off infection. Hope it heals up by itself.”

“That’s it?” Anger bubbles up in Dirk’s voice. “That’s… just _wait?”_

“Dirk—” Roxy begins.

“No, no, stop. _Stop._ Jake, this is my little brother, you fucking _listen to me_ and answer my goddamn questions.”

Jake’s jaw hardens. “Fine. Ask.”

“Is he going to die?”

“Maybe.”

The blunt answer seems to take Dirk off guard. It definitely sends a ripple of shock through your spine. “Okay." He runs anxious hands through his hair. "Okay. So we take him to the mainland.”

It’s Dad who answers. “You know we can’t do that.”

“Why the hell _not?”_

“Did you hear her yesterday?” Dad bites back. “She controls the planet now. If we set foot off this island, they’ll take Dave and you will never see him again. It puts us _all_ in danger.”

“So you’re gonna let my kid die, _James?”_

“No one is letting Dave die!”

“You could have goddamn fooled me!”

“Both of you, shut the fuck up!” Roxy shouts, loud enough you’re surprised it doesn’t wake Dave. “James, _grow a fucking soul_ for five minutes. Dirk, you’re a control freak who needs to _chill out_ for once in your life. Both of you, just _shut the fuck up.”_

The room falls silent.

“John,” Roxy says, and you jump a little but look at her. “You can feel Dave’s breathing, right?”

“If I look for it, yeah.” Your mouth is dry. “If… if this happens again, I can try to breathe for him. Like a ventilator.”

“You can do that?” Jade asks, eyes wide.

“I think so. I mean, I’ve never tried it, but I probably can.” You shrug.

“Okay.” Roxy runs a hand through her hair. “Okay. So there’s that. The mainland isn’t an option, but maybe… I mean, Crocker doesn’t exactly have the hearts of the people, right? We can try to get in touch with a hospital, ask them what to do on the down low.”

“Transmissions from the island are still shut down,” Jake points out. “I don’t want drones picking up signals from here.”

“We can use cell phones, those are harder to track.” Roxy puffs out a long breath. “We’re gonna stop the painkillers though. He’s just going to have to deal with ibuprofen.”

Rose, standing next to you, quietly whispers, “Kanaya,” like she’s realized something.

You nudge her to be quiet.

“What, Rose?”

“I said, can I help?”

“I… no. Sorry, no. We can’t do a lot tonight.” Roxy looks back to Jake. “I think it’s time for everyone to head back to bed. For now.” She takes one look at Dirk and quickly adds, “You can take the next shift with him, just… y’know. Call us if anything changes.”

~

None of you go back to sleep for a while after that.

Jade pretends to, for a few minutes, but she gives up and comes to sit with Rose instead. You know you should try to sleep – you’ve stayed awake for two days now, that _can’t_ be healthy – but as long as your eyes aren’t burning, you decide you’re not tired enough.

“So.” Dirk eyes Rose with a look you can only call parental. _“Kanaya.”_

Rose goes pink and looks intently at the ground. “One of the Zodiac children.”

“I know. Virgo, right?” At her look of surprise, he shrugs. “You sent a lot of fuckin’ files. Don’t be shocked that we actually _read_ some of them.”

“Well, _there’s_ something to do while we’re stuck here,” you say to Rose. “What do you think they wrote about us?”

Dirk answers instead. “Oh, there’s a whole subfile about y’all. Suspected locations, stuff like that. Apparently they were looking for Jade in the Philippines.”

She snickers.

“So Kanaya?” Dirk prods.

Rose sighs wearily. “She has a healing ability. If she were here, she could help. Probably.”

“But we don’t even know if she’s still alive now,” you point out.

Dirk nods slowly. “The Pesterchum account twinArmageddons was deactivated yesterday. So we can’t use that to contact them.”

Your heart skips a beat. Is Dirk going to help you get back in touch with the Zodiac Project?

“But there’s other accounts, right?” he continues. “The gallows one?”

“Yeah, that’s Terezi, but… Sollux said she didn’t use it much. She’s blind, and typing is hard.”

“Can you see if her account is still active?”

You nod and poke Jade until she sighs and digs out her cell phone. You have no idea where yours is. Probably still at Prospit.

By the time you sign out of gardenGnostic and into ectoBiologist, Rose is holding her hair back to let Dirk, sans shades, carefully inspect her gillslit.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not unless something irritates it.”

“Huh. So I shouldn’t jam a screwdriver in it.”

“That would be unpleasant and rather sociopathic of you, so yes, please don’t.”

You cut in. “Terezi’s account is still there. Should I send her something, or…?”

“Not yet.” Dirk slides his shades back on. “Wait and see if she contacts you first. They might be watching.”

You want to ask him what his plan is. You can tell he’s thinking of one – something he doesn’t want to share with the others, or with you. But before you can ask what he’s considering, Dave’s breathing hitches and rattles and you grab a handful of air, prepared to do whatever you have to with it, before he chokes out a trickle of blood and returns to normal.

Jade goes to sleep at around three in the morning.

Rose dozes off when the sun comes up.

You and Dirk don’t sleep at all.

~

“…not _really_ a greenhouse, it’s just the top of what used to be a lighthouse,” Jade explains as she leads you up yet another flight of stairs. “But it has glass walls and it wasn’t that hard to install a watering system, and the supply planes only come every other month so it’s almost impossible to get fresh fruit or vegetables _anyway,_ so hey, garden.”

You struggle to keep up with her. “Okay, but why are we coming up here?”

“Because Rose is still asleep and I want your help taking care of the plants. You’re free labor!”

You roll your eyes behind her back as the two of you climb into the greenhouse. Jade hands you a short broom. “So what are we gonna plan behind the grownups’ backs?” she asks brightly.

The broom almost slips out of your hands. “Wh—”

“I mean, I know you’re thinking it.” She taps a trowel against her palm contemplatively. “Okay, you know where I see all this ending up? I mean, I’m not Dave, so I don’t See it or whatever, but I mean I can tell where this is all going…”

“Yeah, no, I get it. Tell me.”

Jade sighs and plunges the trowel a little too deep into a pot of soil. She pauses, staring at it for a few seconds before she speaks again. “They’re all really freaked out by what happened to Dave.”

“No shit.”

“You don’t get it.” Jade nudges her glasses further up on her nose and won’t meet your eye. “They kind of thought… we had immunity, you know? Crocker wants us back really bad. She’s wanted us back for years. Nobody thought she’d try to hurt us. That’s why we didn’t come straight after you and Rose at Prospit. We thought you’d be safe there until we got a plan together. But then, you know, Dave happened, and then she tried to shoot down the helicopter.”

You can hear Dave’s ribs break again and try not to flinch.

“Now, Dave might die. Crocker isn’t around, but if anything, that leaves us in even more danger from her ‘subordinates,’ or whatever. We don’t even have Becquerel to get us out of here if things get bad.” Jade pauses to wriggle a carrot out of its pot, shaking dirt from it in showers. “They’re paranoid as fuck, John. And I can’t even blame them, not really.”

You process that for a moment. “Okay. So you’re thinking… what? We sneak around behind their backs and make plans?”

“Something like that.”

“Plans to do what?”

Her shoulders slump. “I don’t know. I kind of wanted to get in a fight with Crocker, but she’s probably passing Jupiter, so that’s not exactly realistic anymore.”

You finally start sweeping, brushing leaf litter and loose soil out from under the rows of planters. “There’s always the drones,” you suggest, trying to think back to what Roxy told you about them. “They share a… neural something, Rose’s mom said. If we can knock it out, the drones die, and that’s her entire army gone.”

Jade nods thoughtfully, rinsing her handful of carrots off in a little sink by the staircase. “If we can find where their neural network is set up,” she says, “and if we can get to it. There’s only three of us, ya know.”

 _Four,_ you start to correct her before you remember. You bite your lip and don’t say anything.

Jade seems to realize what she’s said and turns the tap off before turning back to you. “Hey, Dave’s going to be okay. He’s not gonna die.”

You give her your best attempt at a smile. “Yeah. I know.”

~

On your third night on the island, you sleepwalk.

You’re dreaming about a city made of gold. There’s a palace in the distance, glittering and imposing – you know you’re supposed to get to it, but every step you take is like trying to go up a steep hill and the spires never seems any closer.

Then something creaks and the world is significantly darker, and you’re blinking away the disorientation in an unfamiliar part of the tower. Something shines bright off the rims of your glasses – which your subconscious mind apparently had the forethought to bring along, thanks sleeping John – and you realize you’re looking at a wall-sized computer screen, almost identical to the one in Roxy’s bunker.

You must be in Jake’s lab. You scrub at your eyes and squint at the screen – it’s a map, you think, showing most of the Pacific. There’s a land mass at the far left that you’re fairly sure is Australia. Crawling across the screen are a few dozen red spots, creeping pixel by pixel over the ocean. None of them are near the island at the center, but you can tell if they keep their pattern, they’ll be here eventually. You can see their paths in your head, crisscrossing the sea in a grid. Patient and in no hurry. Their prey isn’t going anywhere.

There’s a counter in the bottom corner that reads 8:16:44:28. Eight days, then.

You shiver in the shadows and duck back out the door to find your way back to bed before anyone wakes up to find you missing.

~

As deeply as last night’s scene is entrenched in your mind, you can’t help but wonder if it’s your imagination. You’re sleep-deprived and everything is blurred around the edges with it – when you go help Jade in her greenhouse, she has to ask you for something three times before it clicks into place. She notices, of course, because she’s _Jade,_ but she doesn’t comment. The dark circles under her eyes tell you why.

Today you’re helping her re-pot a seedling. It isn’t a two-person job, but you have a feeling she just likes to be up here away from the adults. You do, too. Rose came up here that one time, two days ago, but mostly she’s been very quiet and following her mom around a lot.

Jade makes a frustrated noise and pokes the new pot of soil with something that vaguely resembles a toothbrush. You blink at her. “What?”

She waves the toothbrush thing at the pot. “The stupid soil’s been settled for too long and it won’t aerate properly. This is why I shouldn’t do things ahead of time, I swear, I should just trust my reminders to remind me of stuff, you’d think I would have learned by now—”

“What reminders?”

Jade pauses and looks down at her color-free hands. “Oh for fuck’s _sake.”_

Her look of angry confusion breaks through your tired brain and you snicker. She throws the toothbrush thing at your head. “Ow, fuck, that was sharp!” you yelp and throw it back.

“Don’t make fun of me, I have narcolepsy!”

“No you _don’t,_ Jade, and stop using that to get out of everything!”

She vaults over the oblivious little plant and tackles you, going right for your ticklish sides without mercy. She doesn’t stop until you yowl and knock her glasses off. You both sit, panting and glaring, in the bits of leaves and dirt littering the greenhouse floor.

Then, for some goddamn reason, you decide to open your mouth and say, “There’re drones coming this way.”

Jade jumps a little, eyes widening. “Wh—how do you know about that?”

“Your grandpa’s tracking them in his lab. They’re gonna get here eventually.” You shrug. The matter feels distant. You can’t muster up any panic about it. “The timer said eight days. Maybe more or less.”

Jade’s lips part before she swallows down her shock. “You weren’t supposed to be in there.”

You stare at her and reach for the plant pot, digging your fingertips into the packed soil. “We’re kind of fucked, aren’t we?” You thread miniscule currents of air into the tiny spaces in the dirt, fluffing it gently with your fingers.

She shrugs halfheartedly. “We still have the helicopter. If they get too close, we can make a run for it.”

You release the threads of air and hand the plant pot back to Jade, the dirt now fluffy and loose. “And go where? If we go to the mainland, drones find us. If we go somewhere off the map, Dave dies.”

Jade winces a little and turns away from you, her tumbling hair falling between you like a wall as she starts digging the plant out of its old pot. She slips the roots out with coaxing determination and you can’t help but feel guilty for upsetting her. Making an effort to control your voice, you say, “We’ll think of something. Your granddad still has connections all over the world, right? I bet he knows where we could go that’s safer than here.”

She sniffles back the tiniest sniffle and nods, pushing her hair back so it’s not between you anymore. “Right. I’ll ask him.” She tips the plant pot to peer into it. “What the fuck did you do here?”

“Aerated the soil. That’s what you were complaining about, right?”

“Oh my god, you’re a freak.”

“Wait, I’m a freak? _You’re_ the one who grew up with an omnipotent god-dog who ate radioactive waste every day, but _I’m_ the freak?” You flick a twig at her.

“I’m gonna fight you, Egbert. Square up.”

“I’ll set your greenhouse on fire.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“I will.”

“I am going to punch you in the throat.”

You bicker all the way back down the spiral stairs.

~

There is, unfortunately for everyone, only one shower on the island.

Rose’s mom fights your dad over it. She wins, locking your dad out as the water runs merrily in the background.

“Roxy, do you have any idea how long it’s been since I shaved?”

“Yeah, James, it was two days ago. I was _there.”_

“Exactly! Hurry up, I hate stubble, it itches.”

“Fuckin’ deal with it, you’re a grown-ass man!”

Apparently, Roxy left a rude image drawn in the steam on the mirror, but you didn’t get to see it before Dad erased it. She saunters into the kitchen with wet hair and snags the seat between you and Dirk, sniffing curiously. “Something smells good, what are we cooking?”

“Ratatouille,” Jade and her grandpa announce in unison from the counter.

Dirk’s face twists. “Oh my god, Roxy, you smell like a drunken Bath and Body Works took a long piss on everything you own.”

“Pfffff. You’re one to talk, wannabe Old Spice Guy. At best, you’re maybe Moderately Stale Spice. Like those packets of chili pepper flakes they give you at Domino’s.”

You don’t doubt that Dirk is about to come up with some even more convoluted metaphor when Jade swoops in and dumps a steaming casserole dish on the bare wooden table. “Everybody shut up and eat,” she announces before plopping in the seat across from you and starts talking animatedly about the frog temple out in the island’s cove.

You tune her out, too busy paying attention to the flow of air in the kitchen. There’s the turbulence of Jake still moving around, and the puffs and pauses of Jade’s chattering – there’s the sleek eel-breath of Rose sitting on your other side, exhaling like an injection, slim and sharp – and if you listen very hard, reaching to the edges of your mind for the faintest and fuzziest currents… there, the rattling rasp of Dave two rooms away.

He still hasn’t woken up since he stopped breathing yesterday. None of you have mentioned it, but you all know he’s probably dying.

Just as you think it, the rattling shudders to a halt.

You stand up so fast you knock your chair over, looking to the doorway. “Dirk—”

He disappears, gone from the room too fast to see. You follow, pulling currents of air behind you like balloon strings, ready to do… whatever you need to, you guess, skidding to a halt in Dave’s room, flicking the lights on.

What hits you first is how _blue_ his lips are, even as they’re coated thinly in blood that bubbles up when Dirk tries to raise his shoulders up and drips away in that thick, careless way blood does.

You take your place next to Dirk and thread careful, methodical strands of air past the blood, past the drops caught in his trachea, splitting them to flow through bronchi and turning them back to breathe out again. They carry blood out with them, but you can’t help that.

It hits you that no one should be this intimately acquainted with their best friend’s chest cavity, but you ignore the nausea that thought brings and focus, closing your eyes so you don’t have to see blue lips and blood, reorienting your world into currents of oxygen that ghost at your skin like worried fingers.

You try not to force the threads too hard, too afraid of hurting Dave further, but when you realize the resistance you feel is liquid heat, you prod a little harder, pushing it away from choked alveoli. You try not to hear the gurgling of blood sliding up his throat with every current you pull back.

Time passes. You aren’t sure how much. You can tell the atmosphere is tense and fearful, but you seem to have woven a little bubble of mechanical calm around you and Dave. In and out. Thread air in – pull it out – take new strands and thread them in again. Stitching your best friend back together as best you know how.

Something finally, finally _catches_ deep in his chest and you let go, suddenly dizzy, and Dave breathes on his own. Shaky and shallow and rattling – but breathing, his body out of excuses to give up.

You wipe sweat from your upper lip and it comes away bloody, and for a moment you can’t tell if it’s Dave’s or yours. Then Rose comes and gently takes your arm, tugging you away to stand with Jade while Roxy and Jake descend.

“Okay. He’s—”

“Yeah, he’s breathing.”

“Sounds like most of the blood’s been cleared out.”

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“It’ll buy him a little time. Even if the bleeding’s stopped, it’s turned into ARDS.”

“Ar-what?”

“Acute respiratory distress syndrome.” Jake sits back, looking pained.

“So what do we do?” Roxy scrubs her fingers angrily through her still-damp hair.

“Nothing.”

The word settles like a stone in your spine.

“Let’s leave them alone,” Roxy says quietly, shooing all of you out the door. “They need time.”

You leave Dirk alone at Dave’s side and try not to look at either of them.

As you leave, you can see Jake go to put a hand on Dirk’s shoulder. He hits it away and Jake backs off, following the rest of you out the door.

 _They need time,_ Roxy said.

Dad meets you all back in the kitchen, none of you having touched the cold ratatouille. He glances around for Dirk before shooting Roxy a bewildered look.

She shakes her head and motions to the doorway. “Dave stopped breathing again.”

“Is he okay?”

She shakes her head. “James, he’s not gonna make it.”

It’s the first time anyone’s said it out loud, but no one looks surprised.

Dad sits heavily at the table. “We could try calling the mainland—” he starts.

“Already tried,” Jake cuts him off. “Called a hospital in Melbourne. They can’t help unless we brought him in, and even then his chances would be slim at best.”

Dad sighs and rubs his eyes and doesn’t say anything.

Under the table, and against all better judgment, you’re opening Pesterchum and tapping out a message to gallowsCalibrator.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay yes this fic is now alternately titled "Prayer Circle For Dave Strider" because i just can't stop being horrible to him
> 
> come yell at me on my tumblr i deserve it


	13. TIED DOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"What the fuck do you mean he's gone?"_

\-- ectoBiologist began pestering gallowsCalibrator --  
EB: i hope you’re still there.  
EB: this is kind of important.  
EB: look, i really don’t care whos listening anymore, just let me talk to terezi.  
EB: dave’s going to die.  
EB: do you know fucked up it is to feel someone stop breathing?  
EB: hello?  
EB: i know you’re blind and can’t read this but  
EB: we really need help here.  
GC: CC4N T H3L;P  
EB: what? terezi?  
EB: that’s you right?  
EB: hello??  
GC: H3S’ D  
GC: Ω1NG 1T1 4G441₦  
EB: who? what’s happening again?  
EB: terezi?  
\-- gallowsCalibrator is offline! --

~

You’re not sure what wakes you up first.

It might have been the rattling of helicopter rotors outside, thrumming loud enough to shake the metal frame, jarring you just halfway out of your uneasy sleep when it’s still dark outside – but later you decide you might have imagined it based on what they told you afterwards.

Or it might have been all the shouting, some hours later.

It’s probably the shouting.

 _“What the fuck do you mean he’s gone?”_ Roxy is white-faced and furious, so furious it makes you shrink back against the wall with half a mind to disappear back upstairs to listen.

“I mean he’s _gone,_ Roxy, he took the damn helicopter and just sodding left.” Jake is rigid with what you think is anger, and it does nothing to alleviate your mounting panic.

“Is he fucking _insane?”_ Roxy snarls. “Dave isn’t going to survive the trip, wherever the hell he thinks he’s taking him!”

“What happened?” Jade finally appears behind you on the stairs. All eyes turn towards you, and you try not to back away.

“Dirk’s gone.” Your dad is there, jaw set and eyes dark. “He took Dave.”

Jade covers her mouth with one hand. “But… where’s he taking him?”

“We don’t know,” Roxy says. “Fiji’s close-ish. But Dave wouldn’t live long enough to get there.”

You back away up the stairs, reeling, as the adults go back to arguing. You have to tell Rose – she’s still asleep, you think, and she doesn’t know.

But she’s not asleep, and when you stumble through the door you find her sitting quietly at the kitchen table. She fixes you with a piercing stare and says, “Dirk’s gone, isn’t he.”

You stop. “How did you know?”

“I heard the helicopter leave this morning.” Her blunt nails drum listlessly on the table. “John, it’s talking again.”

“What’s talking?”

“The thing. In my sleep.” She stares straight ahead. The gray from Prospit has faded away from her skin and yours, but the thin folds of skin by her ears haven’t gone away. “It’s trying to tell me something. I’m not sure what, but it’s trying. It says the same thing over and over. Like it’s trying to teach a particularly deaf child to say mama.”

You sit down next to her, slowly, like she might try to hit you if you move too fast. “Okay…”

“I think it knows she’s gone.” Rose’s nails tap out a quicker rhythm. “The cat’s away. It knows.”

Your glasses are sliding down your nose. You shove them back in place. “Why would it be scared of her, though? Isn’t it, like… huge?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps she can punish it nonetheless for misbehaving.”

Maybe it’s just as frightened of her as you are. You feel a pang of sympathy for it. “So what do we do now?”

“We can’t get off the island anymore,” Rose points out. “No helicopter, no Becquerel. We can’t do anything. We’re sitting ducks.”

Cold dread seeps up your neck. “But the drones are still looking for us.”

“And if they catch Dirk, which they will, they’ll be zeroing in much more quickly.” Her nails click on the table even faster. “I give us a day. Maybe two.”

You wonder if she’s thought this through herself, or if the thing in her sleep told her so. You decide it doesn’t matter. “I’ll ask Jade what she thinks.”

Rose hums in agreement.

~

As usual, Jade is a step ahead of you.

“The transportalizer,” she says to all of you, unscrewing a panel from the round pad in the center of the room. “Normally it only uses enough power to get you from one floor to another, but if we cut the energy to the rest of the tower, we can boost it high enough to get us off the island, as long as we have somewhere to go.”

Roxy comes and leans over Jade’s shoulder to inspect the teleporter’s inner workings. “We’ll have to reprogram the coordinates,” she points out. “I can do that, if we can figure out a place to go.”

“Should we go after Dirk?” Jake asks tentatively. “I know he’s being pigheaded, but… confound it, we can’t abandon him to the drones.”

“Fuck Dirk,” Roxy says. “Drones’ll pick him up before he hits land. We’ll worry about him and Dave later. Where should we try to go?”

“Prospit,” you say.

There’s a beat of silence.

“John—” your dad starts.

“What?” you snap more harshly than you mean to. “Dad, there is nowhere safe! They’re going to track us down no matter where we go!”

“And so you want to walk right back into their hands!”

“The Zodiac kids can _help_ us, Dad! We broke in once, we can do it again before they have a chance to get their shit back together—”

“They won’t help us, John! I don’t know what they acted like while you were inside, but they are feral. They would turn on us just as soon as they would a drone!”

“You don’t know that!”

“Yes, we do,” Roxy interrupts. Both you and your dad turn to her. She rubs her eyes, smudging her eyeliner. “James, show him the files.”

“We agreed that wasn’t—”

“Just do it, for crying out loud, they’re not gonna listen otherwise.”

You share a confused look with Jade. “What files?”

Roxy looks pointedly at Jake.

He sighs. “Did they ever mention a place called Skaia?”

~

INCIDENT REPORT

An incident occurred two days ago at the Skaia facility, catalyzed during one of the Field Leadership and Response Practice (FLARP) simulations. Due to a series of unfortunate coincidences, the incident resulted in a number of injuries to Zodiac units. We have done our best to arrange the major events in chronological order, as our surveillance footage of the event is incomplete for reasons that will be explained.

\- The FLARP simulation in question was a Scratch Scenario. Two teams of two members each are set to compete to reach a Scratch object – a plain white orb whose function varies each time, holding weaponry, food, etc. for units to use as they see fit. In this specific case, the Scratch contained an explosive device. The purpose of the simulation was to see if a team would identify it as such and deactivate it. The teams in question were Charge (Aries & Taurus) and Scourge (Libra & Scorpio).

\- At the start of the simulation, Scorpio apparently planned to delay Taurus whilst her teammate acquired the Scratch. However, the confrontation escalated and ended when Scorpio pushed Taurus from a high piece of testing equipment, rendering him crippled. Aries came upon the scene, and having apparently developed a strong bond to Taurus, she attacked Scorpio in what appears to be a fit of vengeance. We have no strong explanation for Scorpio’s ensuing actions – she may have been drunk on power, or forgotten that the simulation was only a simulation. Either way, she proceeded to (we believe) stab Aries with a sharp instrument we have been unable to find or identify. (This marks the point at which our security footage ends, but we have gathered eyewitness accounts.)

\- Team Scourge reunited and attempted to finish the simulation while the Midnight Crew tried to shut it down and retrieve them. They did find the Scratch – however, an apparent disagreement had arisen over Scorpio’s excessive force dealing with Aries and Taurus. Libra correctly identified the Scratch as an explosive, but rather than share the information, she allowed Scorpio to handle it in silence. The ensuing explosion tore Scorpio’s left eye from its socket and a near amputation of her left arm. Enraged at her teammate’s betrayal, Scorpio seems to have attacked Libra through unidentified means, and blinded her in both eyes. Both units are under sedation at time of writing, but we do not expect any eyesight to return.

\- The FLARP fiasco occurred, unfortunately, fairly loudly. Capricorn was being held in solitary confinement after his attempt on Libra’s life last week, and seems to have identified the disturbance as an ideal time to escape. He apparently tore his cell door from its hinges at around the point that Aries confronted Scorpio, and escaped the holding cells via the vents. His neural signature was picked up by thankfully-nearby Cancer, who realized the threat he posed and immediately informed Sagittarius, asking him to find and subdue Capricorn until a Crew member could be found to handle him. Sagittarius agreed.

\- Units Gemini, Pisces, and Virgo were also nearby, collecting in a common space a short distance from Cancer. Aquarius arrived on the scene and argued with Gemini about something irrelevant. In a typical situation, Aries serves as an effective buffer between the two, but as she was occupied in the FLARP simulation, the situation escalated without her. Pisces attempted to intervene as the situation got quickly out of hand, but she was ignored. Gemini and Aquarius’s dispute came to a fight, both using lethal psionic force. The shockwave knocked out the entire facility’s systems, including interfaculty communication and surveillance. Hereafter, all accounts are eyewitness testimony from both Zodiac units and faculty.

\- Aquarius apparently won the fight as Gemini burned out; Pisces, thinking him dead, attempted to harm Aquarius. Aquarius, for unknown reasons, fired a bolt of his white magic through her chest. At this, Virgo finally stepped in to try and heal the damage, but Aquarius seems to have panicked and done to her what he did to Pisces. Cancer saw and heard the entire encounter, but the emotional atmosphere rendered him incapacitated and unable to intervene. After Aquarius fled, Cancer, believing Virgo and Pisces dead, carried Gemini out of the room in search of a Crew member.

\- Sagittarius and Leo had been training alone when Cancer’s summons reached them, and Leo was told to stay behind whilst Sagittarius went in search of rogue Capricorn. She apparently agreed, but followed him at a distance anyway. Sagittarius found Capricorn near Skaia’s exits and attempted to stop him from leaving the facility. In return, Capricorn broke his knee and began to strangle him with an unknown ligature before Sagittarius could fight back. At this, Leo intervened. She managed to slash Capricorn’s face open, but he caught her and apparently proceeded to bludgeon her repeatedly with blunt objects. He left them both for dead.

\- Scorpio escaped the FLARP field before she could be apprehended by the Midnight Crew, and seems to have encountered Aquarius (who we suspect to have been suffering a form of psychotic episode) and Capricorn. Before any fighting could break out between the three, they were joined by an unbelievably angry Virgo, who proceeded to paralyze Aquarius via nervepoint combat, subdue Scorpio with a fist to the jaw, and frighten Capricorn into fleeing. Capricorn was later apprehended and pacified by Cancer.

The effects of this incident obviously display several issues that need to be addressed, both by the Midnight Crew and by the CEO herself, and we have compiled a short list of the “fallout” below. We will be sending the medical team’s detailed reports immediately following this account for further information on the units’ injuries.

\- Aries suffered great blood loss and minor death (heart stopped for approximately 5-20 minutes) but suffered no observable brain damage or psionic handicap.

\- Taurus’s spine has been repaired surgically, but the trauma seems to have caused some type of psychosomatic mental block that prevents him from walking. Furthermore, scans show that his psionic activity has decreased from marginal to almost nonexistent.

\- Gemini’s activity has returned to normal, but Aquarius’s white magic seems to have forced a “blown fuse” and caused immediate burnout. He awoke from sedation with some double vision but is otherwise returning quickly to normal.

\- Leo received several blunt force trauma injuries, including a severe concussion and internal bleeding, but shows no signs of permanent damage.

\- Cancer is the only unit to escape physical harm, but the strain and psychological trauma (to say nothing of the stress on his psionic center) has left him under sedation to prevent panic attacks. He will, however, recover in due time.

\- Virgo sustained a lethal blast of white magic and still had the strength to get up within minutes to pursue her attacker and proceeded to subdue both him and Scorpio. She will be fine – only left with some abdominal scarring.

\- Libra’s eyesight will not return, but it will have no effect on her psionic abilities.

\- Scorpio had major blood loss from the detonation – her left eye was ejected from its socket and the orbital was too damaged to replace it. We can discuss an implant, but I personally doubt that we have anything sophisticated enough _to_ implant. Severe damage occurred to her left arm (the one that had been holding the Scratch device when it detonated), but it is salvageable with Virgo assisting to repair nerves. Apart from her eye, Scorpio should have no permanent damage.

\- Sagittarius has some bruising around his throat and a shattered kneecap, but will recover with no permanent effects.

\- Capricorn will bear scars from Leo’s assault, but as he is still under sedation with psionic dampeners, we cannot determine if his abilities are damaged or if he is suffering any other injuries.

\- Aquarius has fairly serious electrical burns on both hands – whether this is from Gemini’s attack or overuse of his own white magic, we cannot tell. Though he is still essentially paralyzed waist-down from Virgo’s nerve attacks, he seems to have no brain damage. We will have his accessory wand removed and put in Crew possession. We are having Virgo attempt to reverse the paralysis, but some may linger if she is unable.

\- Pisces suffered electrical burns to both skin and several internal organs; namely, her primary and secondary respiratory systems. The burns were judged by the medical team as “severe” and she was the first unit taken in for surgery. At time of writing, she is recovering under anaesthesia to prevent undue pain, a ventilator to keep her lungs functioning, and is immersed in saline in an attempt to keep her gill system from shutting down. We do not foresee permanent damage, but in the interest of full transparency to the CEO (and Ms. Queen does not wish me to disclose this)… Pisces has not shown brain waves indicative of communing with the Source. CEO may wish to contact It herself and ensure it has suffered no backlash.

Midnight Crew will be making many changes in the future (listed in attachment, and include withholding accessory weapons from units and each Crew member undergoing basic trauma medical care training), but I am compelled to add my personal recommendation that Skaia be abandoned. The facility served us well when the units were young, but they have grown a good deal stronger and a great deal less stable; Skaia cannot contain them. Even now, the facility is in shambles from the frequent discharges of power and our repair team simply cannot keep up. We have put together and are continually adding to a list of potential alternate locations for a more secure, “grown-up” facility. However, these are only suggestions, and we will of course take whatever avenue of action CEO decides.

If CEO has any questions, desires, or requirements, I can be reached at any hour through the usual channels. We do sincerely apologize for the oversights and will rectify these mistakes immediately – they will not happen again. We await CEO’s opinions and further instructions.

-          J. Noir

~

There’s a short video attachment to the screenshotted email.

It shows some kinds of outdoor arena, dotted with wooden structures in a way that reminds you of a paintball field. Aradia is in the frame, matted hair swaying in a breeze. The video doesn’t have sound, but from the way she gestures and bares her teeth, you can tell she’s shouting at someone.

Vriska appears in the shot. Her back is to the camera but you recognize her mismatched horns. She doesn’t seem to be saying anything.

Aradia’s head lowers until her horns point at Vriska. A threat pose.

The image flickers and tears.

There’s a flash of action and you can see Vriska’s face, spattered with something dark – Aradia on the grass struggling to get back up – the screen tears again in red and blue, and then goes dark completely.

The file ends at 0:14.

“What the hell?” Jade says in shock, and restarts the file. “I didn’t even see what happened!”

You sit back. You don’t want to watch again.

“You don’t have to see what happened,” Jake says. “Do you see, now? They’re not—they aren’t human. They’re animals that can talk.”

Your mouth is dry. You remember Vriska cornering you, her empty eye socket burning in your memory. You want to deny it, to tell Jake he’s wrong, but the words churn in your chest and don’t come out.

“One psychotic break does not mean they’re all soulless monsters,” Rose points out reasonably, but there’s a tremor in her voice. The video has her shaken, too.

You try to agree with her, but then hear Sollux’s darkly amused voice saying _When Karkat was eleven he punched out half my teeth, see?_ You swallow.

“No,” your dad says to Rose. “But one psychotic break every month, _that’s_ when things get a bit suspicious.”

“It’s not their _fault,_ ” Roxy says in a very motherly way. “Human brains just aren’t meant for that kind of power. They were babies when all this happened to them. It’s not _their_ fault. But they’re _dangerous,_ Rose, whether they mean to be or not.”

Jade’s stopped the video right on the image tear – right on the moment where Vriska’s half-turned to face the camera with blood splattered on her face, eyes wild and teeth bared in a manic grin. You look away.

Dad notices your distress and gently pulls you away, turning you to face him. “John,” he says, quiet and calming, “I know it’s hard to watch—”

“She was my roommate,” you blurt out, not knowing why that of all things is coming to mind. “Aradia. She – didn’t ever try to hurt me, she was nice, Dad, she was genuinely nice, even though a month earlier she fucking _died—”_ dark blood spattered on Vriska’s face while she struggled on the grass—

“John. Shhh, calm down, I know. Jake, shut it off.”

The screen goes blank.

~

By now, you can tell the difference between when Rose is having a conversation or a nightmare.

So you shake her shoulder at two A.M. and whisper her name until she wakes up wide-eyed and breathing hard. “John.”

“’s okay,” you try to reassure her. “It was a dream.”

“It wants us to go back.”

You blink at her through the fuzz of your shitty eyesight. “What?”

“Gl’bgolyb.” Her eyes drill into yours in the darkness. Jade snores a little, a few feet away. “It wants us to go back to Prospit.”

You realize your hand is still half-outstretched from where you shook her awake, and slowly lower it. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Something’s happened. Have you talked with Terezi?”

“Two days ago. Right before Dirk left. She hasn’t replied since then.” You paw through Jade’s things until you come up with her phone and sign into your Pesterchum account. “The last thing she said was… _‘he’s doing it again.’_ That’s the last I’ve heard from her.” You hold the phone out to Rose, who squints against the bright screen.

“We need to go there,” she says, and you don’t question her.

~

Jade and Roxy work on refitting the transportalizer. You and Rose keep them company.

A room over, Jake tells your dad, in a voice he probably thinks you can’t hear, that drones are zeroing in on the island. They’ve caught Dave and Dirk and are searching the ocean near where they found them.

You wonder if Dirk is dead now, but you don’t say that out loud. Lately you’ve had to be careful with what you say out loud – you know Dad is starting to worry about your mental stability. To be honest, so are you.

“You think they’re all right?” your dad say, echoing your thoughts.

“I doubt it. Dave probably didn’t survive the trip, and I can’t imagine why they would keep Dirk around.”

“Jesus, Jake.”

“I’m only trying to say—”

“Say it with more tact next time, Christ. The kid _died._ Hell, I remember having to watch him for a few hours when Dirk and Roxy got caught up in some coding project. Couldn’t have been more than a year old.”

“We don’t _know_ that he’s dead, James.”

“We would’ve heard by now if they had him,” Dad fires back. You can’t see him, but he sounds unimaginably tired. You wonder if he’s had trouble sleeping, too. “You said it yourself. Dave probably didn’t survive the trip. He was hardly breathing as it was.”

Jake says something else, but then Rose nudges you in the ribs and breaks your concentration. You blink and look up to see Jade and Roxy both looking at you expectantly. “Sorry, what? I wasn’t paying attention.”

“She said,” Jade rolls her eyes, “can you read off the coordinates for us?”

Jake had eventually found somewhere in Poland he had deemed safe enough. You can tell Dad has been arguing with him about it, but never when you can overhear.

Rose leans over and shows you a list of coordinates on Jade’s phone. You take it and open your mouth to list off the numbers when you notice.

**Prospit MedCore, Quebec, Canada. North, 45.9297…**

You meet Rose’s eyes for an instant and she stares back at you impassively. _Lie to them._ You can hear her command you like she’s said it out loud.

“Earth to Egbert.” Jade’s head appears over the transportalizer, eyes narrowed in irritation at you. “Coordinates, please. I know Poland isn’t gonna be a fun time, but let’s pick up the pace.”

You swallow and hope they don’t hear the tremor in your voice. “North… ah, forty-five point nine two nine seven four nine oh, west seventy-four…”

~

You don’t like lying to your friends.

Hell, you can’t even lie to your _dad._ It’s not like he can see right through you, either – you just can’t do it. The deceit crawls up your throat and you’re apologizing for the whole thing before the lies are even finished. You’re a shitty liar and Rose knows it, which you think is why she’s been following you around while her mom helps Jade with the teleporter.

Dad is arguing with Jake. You can’t hear the words, but the angry hushed voices drift down the stairs anyway. Although, if you tweak the way the air flows through the dusty vents… and fiddle with the ones around the stairs… you can _just_ about _…_

“—public? She’s a sociopath, but she’s not Caligula.” Your dad’s voice comes into fuzzy focus, like a radio with poor reception. From the way Rose perks up, you think she can hear it too.

“Maybe not. But Ampora might as well be, and he’s the one in charge while she’s away. Having Dirk in custody gives him the perfect excuse to cement his power.”

“Jake, all it says is there’s going to be a televised event. For all we know it could just be more propaganda. Maybe they’re unveiling the Zodiac project.”

“Or maybe they’re murdering Dirk to show what happens to anyone who defies her.”

Rose goes very still beside you.

“You have no reason to think they’re executing Dirk!” Dad snaps. He’s trying to sound angry but the tremors are fear, you remember from when you were nine and almost hit by a car and he’d sounded just like that. “For all we know he’s dead already!”

“And that’s supposed to be a _better—”_

They both go silent. Then:

“Is that coming from the lab?”

“James, go downstairs and make sure they’re all there.”

“Jake—”

Jake doesn’t reply and you let go of the air as Dad comes around the staircase, pretending to be casual even as his eyes flick from one person to another. Counting heads. “How’s it coming?”

“Fine.” Jade’s head pokes up from the transportalizer. There’s a grease stain on her cheekbone from where she’d pushed her glasses up earlier. You haven’t told her about it yet. “It’s the power rerouting that’s being a bitch. We have to replace most of the wires, and there is approximately one metric fuckton of wires in here.”

“She’f got dat rifght,” Roxy mumbles around a mouthful of wire nuts. She spits one into her palm and pokes something you can’t see. “Sholdering torch.”

Jade leans over with a small tool and there’s a brief smell of melted metal. “Anyway,” she says over her shoulder, “even after we’re done, if we want to do it the slow way, it’ll need another day or two to siphon off enough energy from the main generators.”

“What if we had to do it the fast way?” you ask. You’re curious, but mostly uneasy. You hadn’t really given much thought to what CrockerCorp might do to Dirk once they’d caught him and Dave. Imprison him, sure – but beyond that, you hadn’t wanted to imagine.

Jade shrugs and puts the lightly-smoking tool on the transportalizer pad. “We would burn out every circuit on the island, and there is a small chance that the whole thing might explode, but I do not think it would take more than an hour to heat up.”

“An hour,” your dad repeats.

“Well, yeah. Pacific Ocean to the middle of Poland. That is kind of a big demand for a device whose job is usually not much more than moving atoms from kitchen to greenhouse!”

“Point taken,” your dad says dryly as Jake comes down the staircase two at a time.

“We’re doing it the fast way,” he says through gritted teeth. “They’re coming.”

~

Your dad takes Roxy’s rifle while she and Jade fire up the transportalizer. She’d wanted to use it herself, but Jake told her to stay and work with the tech. “If they get here before it’s ready to use,” he’d said, clipping a scope to a gun that you probably wouldn’t even be able to lift, much less shoot, “then we’ll hold them off. But you and Jade need to make sure it doesn’t blow whilst it’s getting the power up.”

Roxy nodded and jerked her head at a nearby table. “A’ight. It’s over there. It pulls to the left, James, so be careful where you’re aiming.”

Dad nods and slings it over his shoulder by the strap before following Jake back up the stairs.

You know if you try to follow, they’ll just stop you. So you wander the round room, pacing in circles while Rose sits still as a statue and Jade and Roxy work in silence. You notice that you’re restlessly tugging at the threads of air in the vents and force yourself to let them go, even with the disturbing realization of how helpless you feel with the air out of your grasp.

For several minutes all you hear is quiet humming from the transportalizer and Roxy half-mumbling technical jargon to herself.

The tower creaks and settles around you. Or is it under siege already? You can’t tell.

Jade pushes her glasses up on her head with the back of her wrist and swipes roughly at her eyes. Maybe she just got smoke in them.

Rose is so still that you have to listen, for just a moment, to make sure she’s breathing. She doesn’t blink, but what disturbs you more is how limp her hands lie. Because you _know_ Rose, you know how she always has to be doing something with them – she’s always drumming her nails or picking at her cuticles or fiddling with long sleeves. It’s one of the reasons you gave her a knitting kit for her birthday.

You stop pacing and grab Roxy’s backpack from under the table. Somewhere at the very bottom you find them, tucked under a jacket, probably there since the Lalonde’s bunker – two shining needles sharp enough to kill.

Rose looks up when you hold them out. Her lips quirk up and she takes them without a word.

It’s been forty-nine minutes when the first tremor shakes the tower.

All of you freeze and look up at the ceiling, where flecks of dust and rust drift down from the metal beams.

“Did they hit—” Roxy starts to wonder.

“Nope.” Jade goes back to the transportalizer’s control panel with shaking hands. “Frog temple. They might think we’re hiding there.”

“So they don’t want us alive anymore,” Rose says softly.

Roxy looks up sharply at her, and you think for a moment she’s going to rebuke her daughter, but then she looks back down and doesn’t say anything at all.

Another tremor, just as far away as the first. They want to be certain, you guess.

“They’ll bomb the temple,” Rose says, while Jade tightens a screw you’ve seen her tighten nine times now. “Then probably set the jungle on fire or try to set off the volcano. They’ll leave the tower for last unless they see us inside.”

You don’t ask her how she knows.

A third tremor, louder and laced with impending doom.

Jade stands up, singed fingers clenched in fists. “I’m done here,” she says. “I’m going up there and I am _helping.”_

“Jade,” Roxy says in a warning mom-voice.

“No. Bec isn’t here and I am not going to sit by while they firebomb his home.” She digs behind a crate and hefts out a rifle – _what the hell is with this family and guns everywhere_ – and checks to see if it’s loaded. “You can handle the transportalizer.” And she’s gone up the stairs.

Rose stands up, a needle in each hand, and follows her before Roxy can stop her.

Roxy looks at you with a hopelessness you’ve only ever seen two days ago, when she told your dad that Dave wasn’t going to make it and she’d looked just like this.

You think about Dave, asleep on your shoulder in the car on your way to New York, the aviators you’d given him for his birthday pushed sideways on his face, and how he might very well be dead now.

You think about Dirk, always tense and anxious and protective to the point of suicidal, pushing you away from falling debris in the bunker tunnels, and how he’s almost _definitely_ dead now.

You think about Jake, up there with a gun against countless drones, gray hair stark against the black metal walls of the tower while he tried to get Dave to breathe again, and how he might never come back down those stairs again.

You think about Becquerel, the white rabbit, white fur drifting even now around your shoes like a guardian angel’s fallen feathers, muzzled and collared and subjugated, and how he’s so unimaginably far away from home and won’t ever come back.

You think about your dad, and you decide you won’t let any of them be hurt. Not ever again.

~

They’re all in Jade’s greenhouse, glass windows cracked open just enough to push a rifle muzzle through, and none of them seem to notice when you come in.

“…set off the volcano,” Jake is saying, eye on his rifle scope as he scans the island. “I doubt they’ll be successful. It hasn’t gone off in decades. You’d need to set off a deep-ocean charge to get it going. They’ll give up pretty soon and just come for the tower.”

“What do we aim for?” Dad asks. The rifle looks alien in his hands.

“Their vital bits are reinforced. I have armor-piercing ammo, but neither of you do, so aim for the neck joint.”

Jade clips her own scope into place and adjusts it carefully. “Do we know how many there are?”

“Twenty-six, if the orders we saw are correct.”

Rose rubs her thumb over the flat ends of her needles and doesn’t say anything. You should tell her to go back down. She doesn’t have a rifle and she doesn’t have your or Jade’s combat abilities – but you can’t bring yourself to say anything.

“Two coming over the volcano,” Jade’s voice rings out. “Should we take them out?”

“Don’t miss.” Jake’s finger tightens on the trigger. “They’ll know right where we are once you fire, and we can’t waste ammo.”

The room goes silent and you have a feeling this is _it,_ the calm before the storm, the last moment of pseudo-calm you’ll have for a while—

Twin gunshots break the silence and then there’s dozens of them, roaring over the hillsides with a sound like jet engines and you fight back the rising panic, they’re just drones, you’ve taken them out before. You’ll be fine. You don’t have to kill them all. Just stall them. Just until the teleport is ready.

Glass shatters as a window bursts in. Rose throws her arm up to shield both of your heads from the spraying shards as Jade shouts something lost in the noise. Gunfire comes steady now and the greenhouse is getting hazy from the smoke.

Jade’s rifle fires and in the sudden blaze you can see one of them, far too close – right outside the greenhouse windows, image warped in the broken glass until you can’t tell what part is the shattered window and which is the drone’s spikes. Jade fires three more times until the drone sparks and falls from the sky.

The roar of the drone engines are deafening. You can’t even hear what Rose says when she turns to face you and shouts something in your face. Dust clings to her eyelashes. There’s broken glass in her hair. She shakes you hard by the shoulders and shouts it again, but she’s cut off by a creaking squeal that’s so close it makes your teeth vibrate, so close you can feel it in your chest.

The floor lurches and Rose shoves you down the staircase as all the greenhouse windows implode.

Everyone comes after you, Rose with a vise grip on your arm and Jade braced against the wall with one hand, the other on her gun, a cut on her cheek oozing blood.

“—trying to take the whole fucking tower down!” she screams over the squeal of what you now recognize as shearing metal. “Get back!”

Jake comes after her, reloading without looking. “Get to the base level!” he shouts after her. “Have Roxy grab one of the semi-aut—”

“Jake, we can’t hold them long enough!” your dad yells back. “There’s too many!”

“There were only supposed to be twenty—”

“The orders were wrong! Get them downstairs!” Dad turns and fires once back up the spiraling staircase – are they inside the tower?

The squeal turns into a shriek as you all stumble onto the ground level where Roxy already has a rifle of her own at her shoulder. You can see her counting heads, looking for anyone missing. “How many?” she barks at Jake.

“They’re trying to knock down the whole bloody tower! I didn’t exactly stop to count!”

Roxy swears, but you can’t hear her over the sound of the shrieking metal. Your balance feels off and it takes you a moment to realize it’s because the floor is tilting, like the entire lighthouse is being uprooted.

“How long until it’s ready?” Jake yells.

“Two minutes would be cutting it clo—”

The ceiling screeches the loudest yet, and then it’s _gone._

You look up to see the tower above you shear away, wood cracking and metal screaming, as it falls sideways and then for an instant all you can see is tropical blue sky.

Then you see red and Roxy is firing up at it, screaming without words and your ears are ringing and there’s wind blowing across your face, air so warm you’ve forgotten it’s September.

You reach for it and tear it apart.

The drone above bursts into pieces like it had a bomb in its chest, and when another takes its place with fuchsia lights powering up, you shove the wind under its wings and crash it into the one descending beside it. You don’t think. You don’t need to. Metal rains down and someone is screaming but none of it can touch you – you _are_ the wind, you are limitless and untouchable and the whole world is cradled in the atmosphere that listens to you, only to you, you are Hermes and Icarus and Pegasus, you will not be bound and _you are angry._

Drones rain down like an overturned box of tin soldiers. None reach the gaping hole where the tower used to be – some are thrown into the others by your hand – some become ash in the liquid lightning spewing from the tip of Rose’s knitting needle – those that die are thrown away by Jade before their hulking corpses fall and crush you – the world is rushing wind and shrieking metal and the sting of debris too small for Jade to catch.

And then someone has you by the wrist and you are not the wind anymore, your feet are on the wreckage-strewn floor and it’s like half your world has gone dark, like you’ve lost one of your senses and are still fumbling to figure out which one is missing –

The zap of the transportalizer curls through the haze in your head and the last thing you remember is blood dripping from your nose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "minor death" jesus Jack way to be thorough there


	14. WHEN THE CHIPS ARE DOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prospit is in ruins, and so are your plans.

_going into shock_

_you said_

_where are we_

_realize what you’ve done_

_is he breathing_

_see what he did_

_get under tree cover_

_don’t have many rounds left_

_what happened here_

_only been a few days_

_any sign of the drones_

_no sign of anyone_

_looks like it was bombed_

_jake he’s still bleeding_

_shouldn’t go in_

_what_ should _we do, then_

_Jake_

_Just let it stop on its own, James, for Christ’s sake just let it alone_

_Mom I think I’m going to be sick_

_No, Grandpa, it’s not my blood, not all of it I mean, most of it is John’s_

Your name finally jars enough fog out of your brain that you snap back into yourself, and _wow okay_ that was such a bad decision.

Pain lances through your skull like lightning, sending everything north of your collarbones to throbbing in unison. You gasp at the pain, inhaling a mouthful of something warm and vile that makes you gag and spasm against whatever solid thing is pressed against your side. It’s like you can feel your neurons sparking and short-circuiting. It hurts enough to make you choke on the pain and somewhere you realize that _this_ is what a real burnout must be.

“Jake—!”

“Don’t let him choke on the blood. Here.” Calloused hands cradle your head and you can breathe again, sucking deep breaths of cold air dusted with something you can’t identify. The pain in your skull fades a little, just enough for you to bring Jake’s voice back into focus.

“…do that? John. Wake up, mate.”

“What if he has brain damage? The Alpha project files, remember, Mituna—”

“If he’s brain damaged then we handle it.” That’s Roxy, you realize, somewhere you can only barely hear her. Or maybe that’s the blood rushing in your ears.

“John, are you hearing me?” Jake sounds more anxious now, and the calloused hands shake you, gentle but firm.

 _Yes,_ you want to say, or at least nod, but it’s like your entire body has gone bluescreen. What if this is permanent? You’ve heard of it, coma patients who were awake for years before anyone realized, and you feel the first vague twinges of panic bloom in your chest.

“James, is he breathing?”

“I think so. John, listen to me. You’ve got to wake up. We have to go.”

How many times have you heard him say that? Every time he woke you up for school, probably – hundreds, at least. So it’s probably more by instinct than willpower when you manage to crack open your eyelids.

Scattered sunlight filters through treetops and makes your eyes burn, but you squint against it until Jake comes into fuzzy focus. Your glasses are missing.

“There we go.” Jake lets go of your face. “Can you tell me your name?”

What? Jake knows your name. You try to answer, but you can’t hear anything come out when your mouth opens. The pain in your skull lances down your spine and you shut your eyes against the pain again.

“Jake,” Roxy calls from somewhere. “Leave him alone. He’s breathing and not comatose. That’s good enough. We gotta figure out what the hell happened here.”

Jake’s hands fall away and you drive back the pain enough to open your eyes again. This time you are prepared for the sunlight and it doesn’t sting so much. There’s the outline of Dad’s jaw – he’s holding you across his chest and he’s spattered with blood that part of you realizes is probably yours. You struggle with your body for a moment and finally turn to see Jake hand Roxy her rifle where she’s kneeling beside Rose, who’s throwing up into the bushes. Jade hovers near you and Dad, rocking on her heels like she wants to say something.

When Roxy takes the gun and stands up, she does. “I’m coming too!”

“No you are not,” Jake says decisively. “Stay here. We won’t be gone long. First sign of anyone, we’ll come straight back.”

“I can help!” she says desperately and you finally notice she’s covered in blood too, more than your dad is.

“Jade, no. I need you _here._ Look after Rose. Stay with James.” Jake motions at Roxy, who reluctantly leaves Rose kneeling by the bushes and follows him into the trees.

You make a halfhearted attempt to sit up and look around, but even the slightest tension makes your muscles tremble and you give up right away. But the movement draws Jade’s attention, and she comes and sits by you. “Is he awake?” she asks your dad.

“Mm-hmm. He watched Jake leave.”

She hums and takes your face in her hands just like her grandpa did. “Well, the concussion probably did not help much. He might be kind of out of it for a while.”

“Christ. I didn’t even think of that.”

“He will be fine. It takes more than that to cause brain damage.”

You finally manage to say, “I’m literally _right_ here, Jade.”

Her face clears and her hands slip away from your face to punch you lightly in the shoulder. “Fuckass. Don’t do that again.”

“Do what?” You paw at your face, trying to dispel the tickle of drying blood there. Dad lets you shakily sit up on your own.

“Burn out your brain and bleed on everyone! Obviously!” She waves a hand at herself, and you have to admit – that _is_ a lot of blood.

“Sorry.” You squint fuzzily at the treetops. “Anyone know where my—” Dad hands you your glasses before you can finish the sentence. “Oh. Thanks.”

“You’re still in trouble.” He frowns at you. “You and Rose, both.”

“Sorry for that too,” you say, even though you’re not. “Are we… near Prospit? What happened?”

Jade rocks back on her heels. “Yeah, thanks for fucking up the coordinates, _asshole.”_

“Rose’s idea.”

Jade flips off Rose, who flips her right back off impassively.

“Prospit’s in ruins,” Dad says. “We didn’t get a good look, we made for the trees as soon as we realized where we were.”

He… doesn’t sound as angry as you thought he’d be?

“What happened to it?”

“That’s what Jake and Roxy are going to find out. Whole place was covered in holes.”

Jade huffs and stands up, dusting leaves and underbrush off her pants. “We should go after them.”

“No, no we should _not,_ that is the exact opposite of what we should do.” Dad frowns at her. “Jade, I will use my parent voice.”

“Dad, it’s really not as scary as you think it is,” you can’t help but add.

“I cut your hair, don’t sass me.”

You smirk and brace one hand on the tree to stand up. “So there’s just… nobody at Prospit? Not even cleanup drones, or anything?”

“Empty.” Rose looks over her shoulder into the woods. “It’s not even smoldering.”

“Maybe the locals had enough,” Jade suggests. “After this whole worldwide coup, I bet even the Canadians are ready to kick ass. Maybe they stormed it.”

Your vision grays for a moment when you’re finally on your feet, but you blink it away, refusing to pass out again when shit’s happening. “Dad, you said… you were talking to Jake, back at the island.”

He stares at you in confusion. “About—?”

“There was going to be some televised event.” You don’t want to think about it, but you have to know. “And he said it might be… Dirk…”

Dad exhales sharply and looks away. “We don’t know anything about it.”

“Jake said—”

“Jake tends to assume the worst. Life like his, you can hardly blame him.”

“Do you think it’s connected to what happened here?” Jade asks, picking at drying blood under her nails.

“It might be. We’ll have to wait and see.”

 _But if it_ is _going to be Dirk’s execution, waiting too long will mean we can’t help him._ You don’t say that out loud, though. Instead, you look up at the sound of shuffling leaves to see Jake and Roxy reappear between the trees.

“Anything?” Dad asks.

Jake shrugs. “A few corpses. All adults, all a day or two old.”

You almost feel bad, until you remember Snowman’s cold, clinical voice. “So this happened in the last, what? Forty-eight hours?”

“Looks that way.”

“But no dead kids,” Roxy adds. “And no cleanup. Which… I have no idea what that means. Maybe it happened fast. Too fast for anyone to call for help. CrockerCorp might not even know this place is fucked yet.”

“They’ll hear the radio silence soon enough,” Dad says. “If they don’t hear anything from Prospit, someone will come investigating eventually. We need to be gone.”

“We’re in… Quebec, right?” Jade pipes up. “Plenty of places to hide in Quebec. We can stay in the woods until it gets too cold, that’s, what, another month?”

“I don’t like it,” Jake says, but he looks to Roxy.

She looks just as lost. “I… James?”

Dad rubs his eyes. “I don’t want us outside for too long, but… for tonight, I don’t see any other options. Unless we want to try finding shelter in what’s left of Prospit.”

You shiver when a chilly breeze blows past. “Let’s not.”

“Settled.” Roxy shoulders her rifle and strides into the woods. “Let’s go camping.”

~

The cold breeze doesn’t let up, rustling through the trees like it’s following you. It should be a comfort to your half-fried brain – a reassurance of safety and promises of a ready weapon, but mostly it just makes you shiver. Even when you do reach for a current, wondering if you could use it to stop the wind and warm up, something short-circuits in your head and it slips away. It kind of scares you – but then again, so does a lot of stuff nowadays.

Your balance is still off, and the uneven forest floor doesn’t help, half-covered in fallen leaves that disguise roots and burrows. Jade walks close beside you and touches your wrist whenever you stumble, and it’s like the ground tilts to compensate. You know she’s just trying to help, but it throws you off.

The wind is steady and quiet and cold, and it doesn’t stop.

Jake and your dad lead the way, arguing quietly. They do that a lot, you’ve noticed.

“…tampered with the coordinates,” Jake is saying with anger shaking his voice. “We’re in more danger now than ever!”

“Don’t blame them,” Dad snaps. “They’re affected by this more than we are. You can’t be angry that they’ve tried taking their own fate into their—”

“You’re all right with this, then?”

There’s a beat of silence, underlined by the rustling leaves. You stumble again. Jade’s fingers brush your wrist and you’re stable again, caught off guard by the sudden reorientation.

Then Dad very quietly says, “My son almost died in my arms today, Jake. I want this nightmare over with.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Jake’s voice is far more subdued than it was before.

“I know. I just.” Dad rubs his eyes again. “You, see, you’ve spent your entire life getting in and out of trouble. Getting in fights with the whole world. Every day at the firing range of life, or however you always put it. I didn’t. Jake, I just… want all of this over with. I want my son safe.”

You haven’t tripped, but Jade’s hand finds yours anyway.

“I understand. It’s going to work out, James, I promise.”

“Yeah.”

The trees rustle and warm rainwater drips on your cheek. You swipe it away and your hand comes away red.

It’s not rainwater.

A dead squirrel falls from the branches, two cruel wounds right through its scrawny body. It twitches.

An instant later, the treetops explode in movement, something dark and big and fast flying right at your face with flashes of blue and a guttural snarl, hitting the ground and vanishing before you can even see what it is.

Jade pulls a handgun out of nowhere, but she can’t even switch off the safety before it’s gone from her hands and in shattered pieces on the ground, casing shredded and trigger gone. Roxy shouts something at Rose, and Jake levels his rifle, but it disappears too in a blurry flash of motion and blue –

It comes at you, cruel cobalt claws piercing through sunlight as easily as they would a dead squirrel, and you say, “Nepeta?”

They’re so close you can feel the ragged tips flutter against your eyelashes when you blink, but they’re frozen; and behind them are pupils contracted to slits in olive eyes, lips parted in shock that show tiny kitten teeth.

“John!” she says, and she smiles wide and pure. “John is here!” She suddenly vanishes and reappears by the dead squirrel, scooping it up and then she’s right in front of you again. “Is John okay?” she says, and reaches up to touch the dried blood on your face. Her claws are so close to your eyes it makes you sweat.

“I’m… yeah, I’m fine. Nepeta, what are you doing out here? What happened to Prospit?”

She frowns a little. “AC is hunting!” She shows you the disemboweled squirrel. “AC’s friends are hungry!”

Rose approaches cautiously. “Hello, Nepeta.” Nepeta hums happily at her. “Where are your friends? Are they all right?”

Nepeta rocks on her heels a few times. The squirrel’s tail sways with the movement like a morbid pendulum. “Hiiiiiiiiding,” she says, fixing your dad and Jake with a wary look.

“It’s okay,” you tell her. “They’re friends.”

“Grown-ups.”

“They’re nice grown-ups. I promise.”

She bites her lip with her tiny fangs. “Karkat says not to let anyone come see us,” she says slowly, “but AC thinks… he _did_ bring the red boy with us, and anyway AC has very good instincts!” She beams up at you and it kind of punches you in the chest with a wave of _ohgodsocute,_ and when you meet Roxy’s gaze over Nepeta’s head it looks like it hit her too.

Wait… Red boy. Your heart starts to pound. It’s Dave. It _has_ to be Dave. They would have brought him here to Prospit. Maybe he met the Zodiac kids and… he’s got to be alive.

Nepeta carefully takes your hand, warm fingers and cold claws. “John and Rose can follow,” she says, and then adds with obvious reluctance, “and the rest of them too.”

“This is Jade,” you say, gesturing at her. “She’s like us.”

Jade waves as Nepeta looks her up and down. “Hi! Your claws look awesome and deadly, and I love them.”

A huge, unstoppable smile creeps over Nepeta’s face and she ducks shyly, tugging your hand to pull you into the woods.

~

It’s a small, unobtrusive opening in a short cliff face that you’d miss if Nepeta hadn’t let go of your hand and crawled into it. You glance back at your dad and try to look confident as you maneuver after her, Rose right behind you.

“AC is back!” Nepeta calls out while you’re occupied with squeezing through the opening. “She brought friends!”

“You brought _what?”_ comes a panicked voice you identify as Karkat. “Oh my god, Nepeta, you—” He stops short as he sees you and Rose. “Wh… John?”

“Long story.” You help Jade through. “Are all of you guys here? What happened to Prospit?”

“Gamzee disappeared when we broke out, but the rest of us are here, and what the fuck are you doing here? Is that, is that fucking _blood?”_ He waves Nepeta off.

You blink as your eyes finally adjust to the dim light and it startles you a little to see them all, clustered in a cramped cavern about the size of a living room. Aradia catches your attention and waves, beaming.

“You broke out?” Rose repeats. “Prospit – that was all you?”

“What’s even _more_ shocking” – Vriska stands up, brushing dirt from her pants – “is that we all actually managed to work together to do it! And no one died! Given the level of incompetence in this group, that’s something to be proud of!” She smirks at you. You pretend not to notice. “We really are _maturing.”_

Karkat seems about to turn on her, when Roxy finally squeezes through the opening and his eyes go wide. “You brought _them?”_

You can understand his worry; it’s not like he’s had a lot of great experiences with adults, and the image of him with three long gashes across his chest is still vivid in your mind. “No, Karkat, it’s fine, I—”

“Fine? _Fine,_ you idiotic—”

“Karkat!” Terezi barks from her place on the ground, cane in her lap. “You are embarrassing us.”

“Think about it. _Logically.”_ Vriska rolls her eyes. “We have them outnumbered, outpowered, and we have that thing. That they want. You know. Chill.” She examines her nails, looking up from under her lashes at your dad, sizing him up and glancing between him and you like she’s comparing you both.

Jade looks around uneasily. “A thing that we want?”

Karkat jerks his nubby horns at the back of the cavern. You look and see a soft white glow bleeding over the walls.

You don’t think – you just _go,_ because you recognize that gentle white light, so different from Rose’s harsh wrecking-ball magic. You want to wonder what they would have that you would want – but you already know, because what else would it be?

“…turn it off, trust me, I’ve _tried,_ I would _love_ to turn it off if I could. Rather be drooling in a corner than spend every waking minute watching dead Daves fly by, or dead Bros or dead Roses or dead Johns…” He sees you and stops.

Kanaya looks up from where she’s kneeling beside him, soft-glowing hands pulling away from his chest in surprise, but you only notice her vaguely in passing because that’s him, _that’s Dave,_ alive and breathing, not dead, not screaming in pain, not corpselike and blue-lipped and _he is alive,_ looking up at you with drawn-together eyebrows through the aviators you remember giving him for his birthday some year.

“John?”

Your throat goes tight and the childish, miserably frightened part of your brain wants to run and throw your arms around him, but you manage to walk over and sit by him like a normal person. “Yeah. Long story.”

Under his shades you can see his eyes flick from your face to the blood on your clothes, to Jade and Rose, and then to your dad and Jake and Roxy. “You’re bleeding?”

“Not anymore. Don’t worry.” You try to look reassuring. “Are you… okay?”

“Oh, yeah, peachy. Absolutely peachy. So many goddamn peaches, fucking everywhere. Georgia called like hey, give us our peaches back, but there are just too many of these fuzzy assholes. Straight up peach catastrophe. This is a downright fruity rumpus asshole fac—”

“He’ll be fine,” Kanaya finally cuts him off. “I’ve seen worse.” She looks pointedly at Sollux.

Rose takes a measured, deliberate step forward. “Dave, do you… What happened?”

He shrugs. “Don’t remember much. There was the helicopter, some loud shit happened, next thing I know, I’m waking up in Prospit with Mother Teresa here doing her laying-on-of-hands bit on my ribcage.”

“He arrived a few days ago in critical condition,” Kanaya supplements. “I was enlisted after he suffered two cardiac arrests, but he _will_ be fine.” She directs these last words to Rose.

“So what happened at Prospit?” you ask again. “Like… specifically?”

“It was something of a group effort,” Kanaya says. “I’m rather proud of how we orchestrated the whole thing. Perhaps Feferi should begin. It did all start with her.”

Feferi bounds up. “Shore! I just…” She glances sidelong at the grownups. “We clam trust them, right?”

Vriska rolls her eyes again. “They’re fine, Feferi, just get this bullshit over with.” Behind her, Terezi pretends to be sneaky as she takes a deep sniff in Roxy’s direction.

“They’re okay,” Karkat says, sounding exasperated. “They’re confused as fuck and kind of scared, but they’ll help.”

That seems to settle things.

“Whale, it all started when She left. Gl’bgolyb knew. It could eel her leaving, and It could talk to me without Her overherring. It said… It has a plan.” She looks at Rose rather apologetically. “It tried to talk to you, too, boat you couldn’t—”

“I couldn’t understand,” Rose murmurs, half to herself. Feferi nods.

“What plan?” Dad prompts gently. Behind him, Nepeta tears into the squirrel and starts to skin it.

Feferi bites her lip with needle teeth. “I’m not shore. It won’t tell me. It says we have to meet It first.”

“Meet It?” you repeat, sure you’ve misheard.

“The thing wants us to see It in goddamn person at the bottom of the ocean,” Dave clarifies. “There’s a research place underwater, though, so we don’t have to worry about the whole not-breathing shit.”

“DERSE-1,” Karkat says. “Deep Epicontinental Research Station Echelon 1. They used it to run tests on the monster, back in the day, but they apparently learned all they needed and abandoned the place a couple years back. There’s just one problem with getting to it.”

“The Black King,” Vriska jumps back in. “It’s meant to be Gl’bgolyb’s bodyguard, keep innocent civilians from stumbling across It. Technically, it’s a drone, but – put it this way. The regular drones are, what, size of an eighteen-wheeler, right? They’re hivemind, all running off Gl’bgolyb’s psionic energy, and they follow given orders to perform a huge range of jobs for CrockerCorp.” She snatches up a rock from the floor and turns to scratch on the wall. “But _this_ fucker? He runs on his own AI, so we can’t predict anything he’ll do. He operates off an independent power source, so even if we _could_ deactivate the other drones, he’d still be a player. And oh yeah – it’s the size of a fucking starship.” She drops the rock and inspects her drawing. It doesn’t even look like a drone – are those _two heads?_ “Oh, right, and he has a grand total of _one_ job. Killing whatever unauthorized idiots wander into his part of the ocean. That’s gonna be us, by the way.”

“In other words,” Terezi finishes, twirling her cane with a flourish, “there is going to be a _very_ engaging fight.”

“Once we take out the Black King,” Feferi continues, “we’ll be free to get into DERSE-1. From there, Gl’bgolyb will tell us how to take Crocker down once and for all, waterever the plan might be.”

“Now _hang on_ just a dickpissing minute,” Roxy cuts in. Everyone goes very quiet. “How are you kids expecting to bring down a giant combat droid with… fifteen teenagers with superpowers and angst?”

“AC is not a teenager! AC is eight!”

“Oh my god, that is literally _not_ better at all.”

“We’re not helpless,” Eridan scoffs. “If you knew even the half—”

“Shut the hell up, Ampora.” Karkat huffs through his teeth and thinks for a minute. Then: “Kanaya, what were you doing at this exact time two days ago?”

Kanaya nods understandingly. “The Midnight Crew had called me to the medical wing. I was meant to facilitate treatment of a new unit who had arrived that afternoon.” She gestures at Dave.

“Aradia and Sollux. What were you two doing?”

“Breaking into the system,” Aradia answers for them both. “Taking out all communications to and from Prospit.”

“Equius and Nepeta?”

“AC was in the vents!” she chirps. “She was cutting camera wires with her claws, and Equius helped her get up and down!”

“Team Scourge, featuring Tavros?”

Vriska rolls her eyes again. “Waiting to cause a backup distraction in case Gamzee’s ploy failed. Which, by the way, it _did.”_

“Eridan.”

“Breakin’ into the weapon vault for my wand an’ waitin’ for the cameras to go down.”

“Fef?”

“In the water training room, in case everyfin went all kinds of wrong.”

Karkat turns back to Roxy, defiant. “You saw what was left of Prospit. We did that _our own fucking selves._ We planned it all out, made goddamn _contingency plans_ in case our first plans went wrong, and then we blinded and deafened CrockerCorp and we took them _out._ With our angst and superpowers and not much fucking else.” He takes an aggressive step towards Roxy, but you know it’s just a display. “This is the only shot we have, and we’re going to fucking take it. Right now, probably none of the higher-ups know what happened at Prospit, but they’re going to find out pretty fucking quick. This is the only window of time we have to _do_ something, before they find us and we’re locked up even tighter somewhere else, and Sollux is plugged into some fucking ship like the good little engine he was raised to be, and—” He stops, jaw clenching and unclenching, and before he can figure out how to go on, Dave interrupts.

“Wait, my Bro isn’t with you?”

You stare down at him, sick dread welling up in your mouth. You swallow it back. Oh god. _Oh god._ He doesn’t know. “Dave… He was the one who… brought you in.”

The little color Dave had drains from his face.

“Dave—” Jade starts.

“Where is he?”

“He’s… they have him, but we think he’s okay—”

“You _think—”_

“Dave.” Roxy kneels at his other side, across from you. “Dirk knew exactly what he was doing. You were going to _die,_ okay, you were actually dying, you stopped breathing like twice—”

“We have to go get him.”

“We don’t even know where he is,” Jade says, voice wavering. “We can’t just waltz in there…”

Dave turns back to you, and _fuck,_ he’s panicking, breath coming too fast and too hard, rattling on the blood still in his lungs. “John, where is he? Where do they… We have to get him back, you have to get him—”

“I… I don’t…” You look up at Dad helplessly, but he looks just as lost as you.

Jade crouches beside you and takes Dave’s hand in hers. “We’ll try,” she promises, and when Karkat’s eyebrows draw together she shoots him a withering glare and adds, “Dirk would be our best asset in a fight. He’s smart, he’s a tactician, and I want him there for the battle. We should try to get him back.” In her hand, Dave’s knuckles whiten.

Karkat exhales sharply and turns away to wipe away Vriska’s sketch. “We’re short on time, Strider, in case you didn’t hear the _first_ thirty fucking times. We can look into where he is, but if it’s in, like, the backwoods of fucking Argentina or some shit, there’s not much we can do.”

You shiver even though the cavern isn’t really cold. Everything is happening too fast, your head still hurts, and Aradia keeps shooting you these little inscrutable looks through the curtain of her hair. Now, she leans over and whispers something in Sollux’s ear. He scowls and shrugs at her.

“James, Roxy, a word?” Jake beckons them over, evidently expecting you all to back off to give them space. When nobody does, he frowns and lowers his voice instead. “We’re not considering this, are we?”

“It’s not like we have any other options,” Dad points out. “They were right. We can’t run and hide forever. If this… thing… has a way to end all of this, I don’t think we should pass it up.”

“Besides,” Roxy says, “it’s like the shouty one said. We got a very small window of not-being-watched time before everybody goes back on lockdown. This is the only plan we have, and we don’t have time to make a new one.”

Jake scrubs a hand through gray hair. “I don’t like this,” he says. “I don’t like the kids being near danger, much less fighting some enormous murder-machine in the middle of the ocean.”

“We’ll be there, too,” Dad says. “We’ll help.”

Roxy snickers. “We’re aaaaalll in thiiiiiiis together…”

“If you start singing, I’m going to shoot you.” Jake sighs. You can see him starting to wear down. “And if what we saw at Prospit is any indication, the last thing they need is _our_ help. But we don’t have a choice.” Then, even quieter: “What are we going to do about Dirk?”

“Depends on where they’re keeping him,” Roxy says. “I mean, I want the kid back too, but if they’re planning an execution this week, I dunno if we have enough—”

“Planning what?” Dave goes rigid.

Roxy pales. “Shit. I didn’t mean… Dave, it’s probably not—”

“There was an announcement,” Dad says, putting a hand on Roxy’s arm to shush her. “There is meant to be a televised event tomorrow, ‘for the glory of the Empire.’ There’s a chance CrockerCorp is going to execute Dirk to prove their power.”

“And you think…” Dave’s voice breaks and the sound makes something in your chest hurt.

“The timeframe fits. Since Crocker is off-planet, her underlings want to cement their own authority to quell rebellion. Killing Dirk would do that pretty effectively, but there are any number of other events they could be planning.”

“Minneapolis,” Sollux says suddenly, prodding at a black smartphone with a white 8 on the back. “They’re keeping him in Minneapolis.”

“That was fast,” Terezi says appreciatively.

You try to think back to your geography class. “That’s not… _really_ far away, right?”

Karkat snags the phone out of Sollux’s hand, swatting him when he reaches for it again. “Fuck off and let me see, Captor – that’s, what, twenty hours if we had a car…” He stops, apparently struggling with the math.

“Sixteen if we do it the fast way,” Sollux supplies, scowling and grabbing the phone back. “Don’t grab my shit, KK.”

“It’s not even _yours,_ you stole it out of Snowman’s coat, you prick. And we’re not doing it the fast way, that’s too far and too many people, your brain would be leaking out of your ears by the time we hit the border.”

“So?”

“We’re banking on your fucked-up brain to bail us out of this giant fight, you dick!”

“Jesus H. Christ, KK, I can handle a short flight—”

“Shut the fuck up, before I shove Nepeta’s dead squirrel down your overactive squawk blister!”

Nepeta looks up, alarmed. “But AC isn’t done yet!”

Aradia extracts the phone from Sollux’s hands and inspects the screen. Sollux doesn’t seem to notice her taking it.

“So what are we gonna do?” Vriska asks, leaning against the cave wall with calculated casualness. “You gonna abandon this poor kid to be executed on TV while we’re like, eighteen hours away?”

You realize you’re grabbing Jade’s wrist and force yourself to let go.

“Vriska, shut the hell up and let me fucking _think!”_ Karkat fists his hands in his hair and Vriska, surprisingly, falls silent.

Then Terezi pipes up, “It _would_ be a big fuck-you to the Empress.”

“I _know!”_

“So when are these delightfully violent shenanigans supposed to take place?” she prods, bracing one hand on the wall and the other leaning on her cane as she stands up. Her nose twitches.

“Two days,” Aradia says quietly, handing Sollux the phone back.

Dave doesn’t say anything, but you can hear his breathing kick up a notch. It takes you a moment to realize that Aradia’s just confirmed it – Dirk is going to die.

“Shit.” Karkat gnaws at his nails. “Okay. Okay, so we have time to plan. To… I don’t know, figure out how to crash the party.”

“Why can’t we just go there an’ break him out now?” Eridan asks.

Vriska slings an arm around his shoulders with a practiced looseness. “Oh, where’s your sense of _drama,_ fish boy? We could be on TV!” She flicks his earfin. He winces and shrugs her off roughly. “Besides,” she continues, “what better way to flip off the old hag than to ruin her entire day with a televised revolt by the kids she groomed for war? C’mon. This is _poetry_. We have to do it, and we have to do it _right.”_

“We can plan tomorrow,” Aradia says, shooting yet another little glance at you. “Everyone’s tired right now, Karkat. John’s covered in blood, Tavros has _actually_ slept through this entire conversation over there, the sun’s going down and we all just pulled off a huge complicated murder-heist and want to go to bed.”

Karkat sighs and rubs at the dark gray circles under his eyes. “Fine. We’ll work something out tomorrow. But we’ll get Dirk back,” he adds, looking straight at Dave. “I’ve met Ampora, he’s a pushover. It’ll barely even be a fight.”

“Right,” Dave says.

You have your doubts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've hit 50k words - this is officially a novel!
> 
> Two chapters left!


	15. BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flying isn't all it's cracked up to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lmao this is like 3k words i'm garbage
> 
> also someone on tumblr asked if I had a playlist for this fic, so uhhh [here you go!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF1B1dlHEow&list=PLC-_cX4MLKrBGCAKANFYzv1Hi6A5hQY60&index=1)

You wake up when someone steps too close to your face and swears quietly.

Blinking away sleep and adjusting to the darkness, you half-sit up and grope for your glasses in time to see Sollux pushing his own back up his nose and grabbing Aradia’s hand. “Is she already outside?” he whispers, so quiet you have to strain to hear it.

Aradia nods, just a dark amorphous blob in the dark. “Are you ready?”

You sit up. “Aradia?”

They both freeze and turn back.

“Don’t worry,” Aradia says in an extraordinarily unconvincing tone. “We’re just—going out, for, ah, this—”

“Shhhhh,” Sollux hisses and turns back to you. “We’re going to get your friend Dirk. We’ll be back by tomorrow in time for the grand finale. Don’t tell KK.”

You blink at his fuzzy silhouette. “You’re going by yourselves?”

“Of course not!” Aradia whispers. “Vriska’s coming, too.”

“That… doesn’t sound like it’ll end well.” You glance over at Karkat snoring on the bare ground a few feet away. “Shouldn’t you wait until tomorrow?”

“Don’t worry about Vriska. It’s all water under the bridge with us.” Aradia grins and her teeth look unsettlingly skeletal in the darkness. “Besides, she’s our most powerful player. We need luck on our side if we’re going to get all of us out of there.”

“Plus we’ll disembowel her if she misbehaves,” Sollux adds.

Aradia shrugs and nods solemnly. “That too.” She grabs Sollux’s sleeve. “We’ll be back soon, John, I promise.”

Sollux pulls the black phone out of a pocket. “Hang on to this. Her passcode is 8-2-T-H-E-8-T-H. You should be able to find somewhere that’ll stream the execution, if… you know, if you want to watch shit go down.”

You stare at the offered phone, still kind of reeling. “I don’t know…” you begin, when Dave draws a shallow, rattling breath next to you, eyelids flickering in half-felt pain before settling again. Your chest aches in sympathy. You can’t let them leave alone.

“I’ll come too,” you say, and it sounds like someone else – too hoarse, too defiant, too pained to be you, but your mouth keeps moving. “I can help. I’ll come with you.”

Aradia and Sollux trade inscrutable looks. Aradia starts to say, “I don’t know if—”

Vriska appears at the mouth of the cave, shadowy and vague with the moonlight behind her. “Are we doing this bullshit or what?” she hisses. “Listen, I’d _love_ to leave without you chumps, but as it happens, _I’m_ the only one in this trio without super-wonderful flight powers. So as much as it genuinely _pains_ me to rely on you both, can we please just—”

Sollux flips her off with both hands and sets Snowman’s phone down by Dave. Aradia offers you a hand up. “Be quiet,” she reminds you gently, nodding at Dave. You don’t look at him as you follow Sollux out of the cave and into the moonlight.

~

The flight is long, turbulent, _freezing fucking cold,_ and long enough to make you regret a whole bunch of your decisions.

By now, the constant gentle pressure of Aradia’s invisible grip is more constricting than comforting the way it had been early on, but it’s been eight hours now and you’re afraid to move too much for fear of throwing off her concentration. The flight had been fun at first, in a giddy adrenaline-junkie way – you’d had flashbacks to all the superhero movies you’ve seen, and figured how bad could it possibly be?

Really, _really_ bad, as it turns out.

Aradia isn’t used to juggling three people at once – as she helpfully informed you _after_ you were all high in the air – much less while slingshotting them nine-hundred-some-odd miles over a few Great Lakes. Sometimes you’ll hear a faint shriek of panic to your right when she slips and drops Vriska a few feet into the cloud layer (you’re honestly not convinced she isn’t doing that on purpose) and sometimes she does it to you, too. Your clothes are clinging wet to your skin from traveling through the thick gray clouds, your cheeks are burned numb from the wind, and the general cold of the atmosphere cuts straight through you.

Sollux drifts along somewhere to your left, almost invisible in the predawn darkness. The only sign he’s there at all is the fuzzy halo of red and blue gliding along, keeping perfect pace.

Aradia is behind all three of you, occasionally shouting directions to Sollux over the wind. About an hour ago she’d mentioned that you were halfway there, and a shivering wet part of your soul keeled over and _died_ because how are you going to even survive six more hours of this? Aren’t you probably in the middle stages of hypothermia by now?

Unable to talk to any of the others without yelling, your thoughts turned to the near future. In the first hour or so, Sollux had drifted close and given you the lowdown on the upcoming mission.

“They’re keeping him at the CrockerCorp headquarters,” he’d said over the low howl of the wind. “The execution’s planned for five in the afternoon, so we’ll have time to catch our breath and plan our attack once we get close enough. We think they’ll bring him out onto the roof for the filming visual, so we’ll have easy access, but if they don’t, it’s not a problem. We can always break some windows.”

His use of the word “attack” had you concerned, but you just nodded.

“They’re not expecting anything to go wrong, and Dualscar probably wants to have nobody else on camera, so there probably won’t be many guards. Once they know we’re there, though, they’ll call in the big guns. So we have to get in, grab your friend, and get out before they have a chance to get drones involved. Then we can get on our way. It might take a little longer going back, but it’ll be over before we have to trek out to the ocean.”

You had nodded again, and Sollux drifted back into the dark.

Aradia’s hold on you wavers a little, and you grab at the nearby air currents just in case she drops you by accident. But it balances again a moment later, and you sigh and let them go. Coming with them was a bad decision. You _still_ have nightmares about drones, for fuck’s sake, what were you thinking? Karkat is probably flipping his shit right now, with four of you gone without any explanation.

And God knows what your dad is going through.

You shiver miserably and shut your eyes against the cold.

~

It’s hard to believe you ever lived in Minneapolis, you reflect as you catch your breath and try to warm up on the roof of a skyscraper some buildings away from the enormous CrockerCorp tower. To be fair, you were still young when you left to hide in Washington – a year old, you think? Next to you, Sollux sits on the wall and stares impassively at the city through his anaglyph glasses. The sun beams down brightly, but it does nothing to help put the feeling back into your hands.

“What time is it?” Aradia asks nobody in particular. She’s still breathing kind of hard and has one hand braced on an enormous air conditioning unit. The trip seems to have taken more effort out of her than she wants to admit.

“Four thirty,” Vriska says, the first words she’s spoken in hours. She stretches, but the tension doesn’t leave her arms. “Can we see anything on the roof?”

“Yes, _something’s_ getting set up.” Aradia squints against the sunlight. “It looks like we got lucky and they _are_ going to film it on the roof.”

“Of course we got lucky.” Vriska snorts. _“I’m_ here. You’re welcome.”

As much as she intimidates you, Vriska’s words do make you feel a bit less anxious. She’s frightening, but you’re still pretty sure she’s on your side.

“Wait until they start filming,” she adds. “And if anyone has the opening to shank Dualscar, take it. I’m sick of him.”

“We’re not here to kill Dualscar,” Aradia says firmly. “He’s _not_ a threat.”

“No, but it’s a nice middle-finger cherry on this fuck-you cake we’re about to serve our glorious Empress, right?”

Aradia stares her down, hand clenching on the AC unit. “We’re not killing Dualscar unless we have to.”

Vriska rolls her eyes and huffs, but doesn’t argue.

“Shit,” Sollux says and points. “He’s there now.”

“Did they move the time up?” Vriska shields her eyes with a hand. “They shouldn’t have…”

You get up and peer at the tower roof. Sure enough, a hulking figure you vaguely recognize from somewhere is pacing back and forth while a shorter figure fiddles with what has to be the camera setup. There’s an out-of-place gray concrete wall set up like a movie backdrop, but you try not to think about what it might be for.

The roof door bangs open with a clang you can hear even from here, and you jump at the sudden noise. Someone emerges, half-dragging someone else, someone blond and uncooperative—

 _“Fuck._ Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Sollux chants, leaping off the wall, and oh god, you were supposed to have more time than this, weren’t you?

“Shit. Okay.” Vriska jumps up too, eyeing the tower up and down. “Uh. Go time, I guess? Aradia, let’s get this show on the road.”

Aradia draws a deep breath and takes her hand off the air conditioning unit. You worry if she’ll be able to make the trip back. At least she’ll be able to stop and rest once you get far enough away from the city, you guess.

“Wind boy,” Vriska says and you snap to attention. _“Your_ job is to grab your friend and get out of the line of fire. I’ll keep the guards off our asses. Aradia, get Dualscar’s rifle off him before he can start shooting. Sollux, go with John.”

“Since when are _you_ calling the shots?” Sollux snaps, but he’s on his feet with blue-red sparks arcing between his horns.

“Since _now.”_ On the other roof, you can see them locking Dirk in place on the gray backdrop. Like he’s going to be facing a firing squad. You can’t see details, but his shades are gone and he isn’t fighting back nearly as hard as he should be.

“We’re going to skirt around to the back,” Aradia says, her voice tight and strained as the familiar humming red halo forms around you again. It jerks roughly when it lifts you off the ground. “We’ll get on the roof without them seeing. From th-there we can spread out and… and strike when we’re ready.”

“Got it, go go _go!”_ Vriska twists to look at the roof.

Aradia pulls you and Vriska closer to her than she had during the trip, and drops all three of you down a few stories. It’s like riding a malfunctioning roller coaster, all abrupt catches and sudden swings when she swerves you around skyscrapers and parking decks, and as much as you trust Aradia you find yourself wondering how she’ll make the home journey with one more person.

There’s one heartstopping moment when she falters trying to push you and Vriska up to the concrete wall of the CrockerCorp roof, and you freefall for an instant before a different pressure catches you – something hot and buzzing and electric and smelling like ozone, and Sollux drifts into view with one hand held palm-out towards you in a haze of blue and red. He’s looking at Aradia.

“AA—”

“Shhhh!” Vriska hisses. She’d caught the concrete and is hauling herself up. “Worry later, rescue _now,_ move it!”

Sollux flicks his wrist and you rise to the edge of the roof, then he grabs Aradia by the wrist and hauls her up too. She sniffs wetly and lets him. They both join you and Vriska behind the small outhouse-sized structure that contains the staircase.

“Good day.” A booming voice rings out and you jump, almost colliding with Vriska. She shoves you back and shushes you. “The event taking place tonight is to be an execution of one Dirk Strider. He is charged with treason against the Empire, theft, destruction of Empire property, and co-conspiring with known enemies of the Empress. Such actions will not be tolerated under the new rule.” Boot heels click rhythmically on the concrete, and you can imagine Dualscar pacing back and forth, preening for the camera. “On the charge of theft – some years ago, Strider, in collaboration with others, stole one of the company’s most highly valued assets from this very building. On the charge of destruction of Empire property – Strider has intentionally and premeditatedly destroyed valuable drones when they attempted to apprehend him. In addition, he, as well as his co-conspirators, caused unthinkable structural damage to a medical research facility only days ago.”

You grind your teeth and grab handfuls of air. _Wait for Vriska’s signal,_ you tell yourself. _Wait for Aradia to get Dualscar’s gun away from him. Don’t do the stupid movie-thing and let him provoke you into ruining the plan._

“On the charge of co-conspiring with known enemies of the Empress,” Dualscar goes on, “Strider has been in contact with other thieves. He has given them aid. He has assisted them in stealing other valuable assets of the company.” A vaguely familiar mechanical _snick_ adds to the clicking boot heels, and it takes you a minute before you recognize it as a rifle bolt sliding into place. “These crimes add up to the charge of treason against the Empire. As the Empress herself is engaging in conquest elsewhere, the duty to punish such crimes falls to me.”

“Fuck!” Vriska snarls and takes off, and just like that you’re in a fight.

Vriska vaults right past Dualscar and flies fist-first into the jaw of the frightened boy behind the camera. She doesn’t touch the camera itself. For the drama, you guess.

 _“Where—”_ Dualscar roars, and his grip on the rifle goes slack for an instant and Aradia is off with no more noise than the swish of her skirt. She goes for the barrel first, pushing it up and away from Dirk in a single fluid motion. A millisecond later, the deafening crack of gunfire stings your ears as it fires into the sky. Aradia lunges for the stock next, and gets a backhand across the cheek for it. She stumbles back, tucks her chin down, and swings her head in a swirl of matted hair and shining copper-gold horns. One slices right across Dualscar’s chest. The spray of blood glitters in the sunlight.

“John!” Sollux hisses, and you finally spring back into action, sprinting after him to the concrete wall. Dirk lifts his head and spots you, but doesn’t react, blinking slow in the sun, arms outstretched against the gray like a gruesome crucifixion. He hardly seems to recognize you. Sollux goes for one wrist, chained to an iron ring set in the wall. You go for the other. It’s in a pretty simple set of handcuffs. You vaguely remember the trick pair you had when you were a kid – there should just be a bar holding the saw-shaped locking mechanism in place. If you could lift it for just a second…

The roof door clangs and Vriska all but hurdles over the fallen cameraman towards it, holding one hand palm-forward at it and the other at her temple, teeth bared – the door jams against the pounding of whoever’s on the other side, but almost at the same time it buckles and crunches. Vriska snarls and plants both hands against it to shove back on whoever’s on the other side, and she whirls to you and Sollux. “Hurry the fuck up!”

You grab a passing current of wind, redirect it into the handcuff mechanism, and then rip it out as hard as you can. The metal shudders and jumps, and the bar lifts just enough for you to pull the handcuff open.

Sollux just plants a hand on the iron ring and it pulses twice and disintegrates. Dirk slips forward and you and Sollux have to lunge to catch him before he hits the floor. “Fuck!” Sollux hisses, dragging Dirk’s arm over his shoulder. “Let’s go!”

You push your shoulder under Dirk’s other side and turn to yell to Aradia when you hear the unmistakable crunch of breaking bones. Vriska yelps and staggers back from the door, left hand dangling loose from her wrist. Sharp white shards stick through the purpling skin like a morbid piece of jewelry. The door buckles again and bursts open on wrenched hinges, and part of you thinks it’d be better if it _were_ drones beyond it – but it’s humans, dozens of them, uniformed and carrying weapons, and you remember Jade saying how just because you’re a psionic child doesn’t mean they can’t still hurt you.

Dualscar roars and you look back just in time to see the toe of the rifle strike hard across Aradia’s jaw. She lets go. She staggers back.

Vriska backs away from the door, wild-eyed and horns down, and you can see her calculate, flicking back and forth from the army pouring out of the stairwell to you and Sollux and Dirk to Dualscar levelling the gun at Aradia’s chest. You see her decide.

She sprints at you and plows into Sollux’s chest, dragging all three of you back to the edge of the roof.

Sollux screams at her, screams words you can’t hear, screams profanities and pleas, screams just to scream something and you want to do the same but your throat is clutched tight around nothing and you’re not even sure if you’re breathing.

Your feet hit the concrete edge and you all start falling as the uniformed humans put you in their sights and somewhere, somebody fires.

You expect to feel something; hot blood spouting from your chest or spraying from Vriska’s, but you only feel the wind in your hair like a siren’s fingers dragging you down to the bottom of the sea. The last thing you see before you fall out of sight is the bleeding hole between Aradia’s shocked eyes. You see her fall.

And you’re gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im sorry
> 
> one chapter left!


	16. DOWN TO THE WIRE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Showtime," you say to nobody in particular.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [i'm really sorry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXs8Cv8U02k)

You’re in a parking deck.

It takes you a minute to register that. You don’t remember getting here. There’s a heaviness at your shoulder – Dirk, it’s Dirk, still half slumped over you, one shaking hand braced against the concrete wall, and someone is shouting –

 _“…could have helped her!”_ Sollux screams, screams so loud it tears his voice raw. “You could have saved her!”

“No I couldn’t!” Vriska screams back, just as loud and just as raw. “Getting the gun was _her_ job, stopping the guards was _mine,_ and we both _fucking failed,_ Sollux, the only difference was _I_ cut my goddamn losses and got _your_ sorry ass out of there!”

“Aradia’s dead!” he shouts, and it hits you like a punch to the chest that oh god she really is dead and you saw her die, Aradia with the ram horns and the wild grin and _she can’t be gone_ –

“And that’s _not my fault!”_ Vriska fires right back.

“She was tired from carrying you all, if you hadn’t—”

“Don’t try blaming this on us! You could have helped her if you wanted! And don’t try blaming John, I _see_ you looking—”

“Both of you. Shut the fuck up.” Dirk finally, _finally_ lifts his head and glares at them.

They shut the fuck up.

It takes you off guard how relieved you are to see him taking control of the situation. “Are you okay?” you ask, because you suppose that’s the logical thing to be concerned about.

“Yeah. Drugs are wearing off. Dave—?”

“He’s fine. Back with the others.” Dave. Dad. Jade. People who are waiting for you. People you have to see. “We should… probably be getting back there,” you suggest carefully. “CrockerCorp is going to be looking for us around here.”

Sollux looks like he’s about to come at you swinging. He wants to _blame_ someone so badly you can see it raw in his eyes and in the way sparks dance around his horns. He’s going to blame you – he’ll blame Vriska too, for letting it happen, and Dirk for needing to be rescued in the first damn place, and hell, he might blame Karkat too if he can rationalize it. And he’s blaming himself, deep in some dark corner of his soul where he thinks no one can see him. But you can see, and you know he’d deny it, and you’d pretend to believe him – and you wish Karkat was here, or even Terezi. Someone who could take a deep breath and read every tumultuous emotion he’s feeling and say just the right thing to calm him, to take the edge off that bottomless well of guilt you’re not sure will ever go away.

But Karkat isn’t here. It’s just you.

So you say, “Sollux, we have to _go.”_

He punches you.

You expected that. You let him hit you anyway. It hurts him more than it does you, probably – he doesn’t tuck his thumb in, but he _does_ manage to strike the corners of his bony knuckles on the edge of your jaw, and though the impact does knock you back a few steps, the way he swears and shakes out his fingers tells you he’s probably never thrown a punch in his life.

“Cut that shit out,” Vriska barks before Dirk can say anything. “John can take you in a fight, _I_ can take you in a fight, this drugged-out human can take you in a fight. Stop it before you start something you can’t finish.” She leans against a long-abandoned car, inspecting her shattered wrist with clinical detachment. “Do you think Kanaya’s gonna be pissed about this? She’s had to regrow these nerves like, three times now. And Terezi is going to take advantage of this side until it’s all f—”

“Was this your plan the whole time?” Sollux explodes. “Did you expect her to—”

Vriska lunges at him, and in a flurry of movement too fast for you to see, manages to hook one horn around Sollux’s and jerk him to within an inch of her nose. “I’m only going to say this once, you _poor tragic little hero,”_ she spits. “Aradia knew perfectly fucking well what she was risking. She _knew_ the plan involved her splitting off from us to wrangle a weaponized Ampora, and she did it _anyway!”_ She jerks her chin at Dirk, and the movement jerks Sollux too. “So blame Aradia, or blame Dualscar, or blame yourself for all I fucking care. But if you try and put this bullshit on me, I will _finally_ end your sad, miserable life. Are we clear?”

A tense silence stretches on for several seconds before Sollux nods, once, sharply. Vriska unhooks her horn with a twist of her head. “Good. Now get us out of here. They’re gonna be looking for us.”

~

The flight back to Quebec is uneventful. Halfway there, you realize you can take some of the strain off of Sollux by parting the air currents ahead of you, and things go a little more smoothly after that, but your hands start to shake with the strain after about two hours and you have to stop.

The flight back is uneventful, sure – but it’s your reception that’s less so.

Karkat is pacing the forest floor when you break into view. You can’t see anyone else outside. He spots you instantly when Sollux lowers you through the treetops, and oh, he is _angry,_ you can see it even from here. His eyebrows are drawn together so tight you don’t think they’ll ever untangle.

“Fucking _hell,_ Sollux, what did you _do?”_ he shouts as soon as your feet touch the ground. It’s been hours and your legs are numb from the cold, and you stumble a few steps. Karkat descends like a bird of prey, circling Sollux and looking him up and down for signs of injury, then swings around to do the same to you, spitting with rage all the while. “Why did you think – in what _universe_ – middle of the _goddamn night_ – John, you just _went along_ with th—” He pulls up short to inspect Vriska’s shattered wrist, then glances around. “Where’s Aradia?”

Vriska pulls her wrist away. “Not right now, Karkat.”

“Is she—”

“I said,” she hisses through gritted teeth, “not right now, Karkat.”

He gets the message and goes white, looking between her and Sollux. “Fuck. God – fuck. Did she—”

Sollux shoves past him and disappears into the narrow cave opening.

“Yeah.” Vriska wipes her nose on her shirtsleeve. “Dualscar shot her. Wasn’t it on camera?”

He shakes his head, once, sharply. “Did you see it? Did you actually _see_ her… die? For sure?”

Vriska nods. She isn’t looking at him.

Karkat looks at you. You think about the bright blood-spurting hole in Aradia’s forehead and swallow, and nod.

“Christ fucking—” He catches himself and glares at Dirk like the whole situation is his fault.

You catch Dirk’s attention and tilt your head at the cave entrance. He cottons on and follows you, Vriska trailing behind. Karkat stays outside.

When you squeeze through the opening, Feferi is already circling Sollux just the way Karkat did, alternating between concern and anger.

“—reelly shouldn’t have – just _look_ at you, you’ve overexerted yourshellf – leaving in the middle of the night like that, you deserve it! – but are you okay?”

Before you can announce yourself, you’re attacked from the side and swept up in a bone-crushing hug that squeezes the breath out of you in a whoosh.

“You are in so much trouble,” your dad says into your hair. _“So_ much trouble. Christ, John, you _will_ be the death of me, what were you thinking? Are you okay?” He lets go of you and looks you up and down exactly the way Karkat had.

“Sorry,” you say lamely. You hadn’t really thought about how to explain yourself. “It’s just… they were going to go without me. And Dirk is my friend, and I thought I should help—”

Jade barrels into you and flings her arms around your neck. “You could have _died,”_ she hisses, eyes bright behind her glasses, and _that’s_ what makes you realize exactly how much trouble you’re in. She headbutts you gently in the shoulder. “You _asshole.”_

You open your mouth to say _No I couldn’t,_ but close it. Truth be told, you hadn’t felt in danger at all – not when you were with Sollux and the rest. The thought of being in danger had hardly even crossed your mind.

Then you think of the spray of Aradia’s blood in the sunlight, and several hours late, your hands finally start to shake.

You’re saved from anyone noticing, though, as Dirk appears in the cavern entrance. He ignores Roxy’s sudden noise of surprise and goes straight to Dave.

“Bro—?”

“Hey.” He grabs Dave in a tight hug. “You okay?”

“Yeah, are you?”

You’re pulled out of eavesdropping by Terezi’s cane thwapping you in the leg. “Pay attention,” she hisses, blank eyes fixed on you. “We need to get out of here as fast as we can.”

You blink at her. “Why?”

Karkat’s voice rises above the low murmur. “Because thanks to this genius stunt, CrockerCorp knows Prospit is done.” He shoves past Rose and glares you down, waving at the cave entrance. “They’re going to send people to investigate, and given that we’re less than two miles from _ground goddamn zero,_ we should get a fucking move on.”

“Where are we going to go?” Rose asks. You’re not sure when she came to stand beside you, but you’re grateful for it.

“DERSE-1. We don’t have anywhere else to go. Might as well get this fight started.”

~

As Dave puts it irritably some hours later, it’s “a bitch and a half” getting to DERSE-1.

“Who knew,” snaps Kanaya testily, “that an obscure and heavily confidential, not to mention heavily guarded, location in the middle of the largest geographic region on the planet could _be_ so difficult to get to?”

That shuts Dave up for a while.

After getting everyone to exit the cave – Tavros’s wheelchair causing no end of annoyance to Karkat especially – Vriska had led the group back to the ruins of Prospit. “Back at Skaia, they stopped using the airstrip once they figured out teleportation,” she explains over her shoulder, striding over the wreckage with her hip-length hair blowing behind her like a victory flag. “If we’re lucky”—she looks sideways at you with a conspiratorial grin—“then the teleport pad at Prospit should still be operational.”

“If there’s a transportalizer in Prospit,” Dirk points out, “then why haven’t they used it to come see what happened?”

“Oh, they’ve _definitely_ tried,” Vriska says as she skirts around a slab of concrete with careful precision. You wonder why she doesn’t just climb over it, then you see a dark brown stain dried up on the ground around it, and you skirt far around it, too. The smell is nauseating. “But it’s blocked off on this end. Probably from debris that _just happened_ to fall into it during our daring escape when some _hellion_ brought down the ceiling. You’re all welcome, by the way. Not that anyone appreciates it.”

You rub your nose in vain hopes of lessening the smell. You can feel Dad’s attention latch on to you at the movement and suppress a wave of tired irritation. He worries, you know that, but jeez, he _could_ dial it back a notch.

Vriska shoulders through a door that hangs loosely off one hinge, showing every sign of having been violently kicked in and then hurriedly propped back up. “Watch out for Fin,” she calls over her shoulder, and you look down just in time to avoid tripping over another bloated corpse. You step slowly over it without looking down. Jade follows close behind you, and when she gasps, you worry she’s seen it – but she hops right over Fin’s body and strides right over to where Vriska stands by a pile of debris. It does look like it’s all fallen in from the ceiling – fluffy pink insulation, chunks of sheetrock and two-by-fours stacked higher than Vriska’s horns.

“Grandpa!” Jade calls. “It’s just like ours!”

You take a closer look at the base of the pile – she’s right. The debris has been carefully arranged (or maybe it just happened to fall that way) to cover every inch of a wide transportalizer pad identical to the one in the Harleys’ lighthouse.

“Well, I _did_ steal the tech from them.” Jake eyes Fin’s corpse with distaste as he edges around it.

Roxy squints at him.

“It was just the schema and blueprints, don’t look at me like that! It’s not like I drove off with one in the boot of my car.”

Roxy squints at him harder.

“AC does not like the itchy stuff!” Nepeta’s scampered right up to the top of the pile and wrinkles her nose at the fluffy pink insulation. She tries to bat a ball of it off the top, but it snags on her claws. She frowns at it, shakes it, and seems about to try chewing it off when Equius says “Do _not_ ” from somewhere behind you. You have to hide a smile. At the doorway, Dad helps Tavros navigate his chair past Fin.

Terezi prods the pad with her cane and sniffs at it. “I _did_ wonder what you were doing,” she says to Vriska.

Vriska shrugs, overly nonchalant. “Covering all the bases. Literally. Now start unburying it. Feferi, tell the grownups where the coordinates are so they can program it.”

“You’re not going to help?” Terezi’s nose scrunches up.

Vriska holds out her swollen, purple wrist. Now that you’re looking, you can see the bulges in the skin where bone shards threaten to pierce through. “I’m gonna be a little busy. You’ll just have to muddle along without my help. Kanaya?”

Kanaya sighs and gestures her over, hands already beginning to glow white.

Jade grabs your arm and drags you over to the teleport pad and starts dragging slabs of sheetrock off the pile. She glances over at you a few times out the corners of her eyes, but you refuse to make eye contact and focus on unburying the transportalizer. You know she’s going to ask about Aradia, or if you’re okay, or why you didn’t take her along when you both knew she could have helped. None of those are conversations you want to have at the moment.

Feferi settles down next to Roxy and rattles off a list of numbers. As Roxy types, you notice Dirk hovering in the doorway, apparently unwilling to step past Fin’s corpse and, at the same time, blocking anyone from leaving with a carefully calculated air of obliviousness. You can’t see his eyes through the dark glass of his shades.

“Check and make sure this is right,” Roxy says to Feferi, leaning back to let her look at the control panel. “I don’t want us hanging around once this puppy is ready to roll. If someone in CrockerCorp finds out the transportalizer works, we’re going to get some company.”

“Whale, they’re probubbly on their way here anywaves,” Feferi comments, hair swinging as she leans down to inspect the numbers. “But yes, those are right!”

“Cool.” Roxy flicks a switch and the transportalizer hums to life under the debris. “I mean, not cool that there’s a fuckton of drones on their way to murder us probably. That’s not the cool part. Obviously.”

“They get it, Roxy,” your dad tells her gently. On top of the pile, Nepeta finally frees her claws from the pink insulation and bounds back down, dislodging chunks of ceiling as she goes.

Jade helps you drag a two-by-four out of the pile and squints at the dust it kicks up. “Can’t we just teleport all the junk away?” she asks no one in particular.

“That would be half-assing it,” Rose’s voice drifts over the pile. “My mother always said not to half-ass things.”

“What? I _never_ said that. Quit lying. Half-ass everything you can get away with. It lowers people’s expectations for you.”

“Anyway,” Dirk calls, loud enough to be heard over Roxy’s pronouncement and the general noise of shifting debris, “can someone tell us what to expect once we hit DERSE-1?”

Karkat hefts a chunk of concrete out of the pile and brushes the dust off his hands. The white dust on his gray skin makes it look as corpselike as Fin’s on the floor. “The coordinates Fef got are straight from the company servers. It might get us into the base underwater, it might drop us at the entry point on the surface. We’ll just have to handle it if—”

“Entry point?” Dad interrupts.

Karkat glares, exasperated. “How the hell do you think they got into an underwater base before they invented teleporting? There’s an anchored buoy on the surface that marks some sub pods they used to get down there back in the day. If we get dumped on the surface, we can use those, but it’ll open us up to the Black King’s attacks. Plus, they’re small as fuck, so we’d have to split up, and nobody wants that.”

In the corner of your eye, you see Dirk’s head jerk, like he wanted to nod but stopped himself.

“The station itself isn’t that big. Maybe the size of Prospit. Probably a little smaller. They don’t send researchers down anymore, so there probably won’t be any guards. If there are, we’ll have to handle them before they raise an alarm. Hope everybody’s prepared for that, because this would be a really shitty time to start getting moral about it.” Karkat looks around the room with a hint of defiance, practically daring anyone to get moral about anything. When he’s met with silence, he goes on. “The Black King is almost guaranteed to detect us. It’ll smash the base to pieces to get us. Fortunately, DERSE-1 is old enough that they used to have to fly in and out. That means it has a retractable airstrip. It isn’t much, but it’ll give some of us a way to distract the King while the rest of us go talk to this bullshit horrorterror thing.”

“A retractable airstrip,” Roxy repeats.

“That’s what I literally just said.” Karkat spares a precious moment to glare at her. “This whole undersea operation used to be pretty hush-hush. Crocker didn’t want anyone catching on, so she kept the airstrip underwater too. It only came up to let planes take off and land. We get in, send the airstrip up, and get back to the surface to fight the King. The rest of you can take sub pods and have your powwow with an ancient tentacle demon.” Karkat scrubs a hand through his wild hair, dusting it with chalky gray. “DERSE-1 has a transportalizer too, so we have an extraction plan once we’re done.”

“Extraction to _where?”_ Jake interjects. “It’s not like we have anywhere to go.”

“The whole goddamn _point_ of this suicidal trip is to get this giant hellbeast in the ocean to tell us how to take Crocker down,” Karkat snaps quickly. “Once we know what It wants us to do, we can use the transportalizer to fucking _do_ it.”

Jake’s eyes narrow, but Dad cuts in before he can say anything. “And this… this _thing_ …. can be trusted?”

“It can.” Feferi stands up, hair falling around her like a cloak. “It’s no happier than we are.”

The room goes very quiet.

“She imprisoned it too, you know. Just like she did with us. It used to be left alone down there, and now…” Feferi looks down at her bare feet and trails off.

There’s a long stretch of quiet before something metal slides out of the pile and crashes to the floor, breaking the silence and making almost everyone jump.

Terezi clears her throat. “We should finish this,” she says far too loudly, prodding the pile with her cane. “Vriska, are you done yet?”

The steady white glow from the corner dissipates. You lean around the debris to see Vriska experimentally flexing her fingers, wincing a little. “It’s done enough,” she says, but even to you she sounds doubtful. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. We’re on a time crunch.”

Equius appears next to you and digs both hands deep into the pile with the sound of cracking wood and ceiling tiles, and when he lifts, half of the pile comes away with him.

“Well you could have _started_ with that,” Vriska bites. Equius ignores her and dumps the debris tidily in a corner of the room before coming back to dig his hands in again. You and Jade back off, figuring he’s got the heavy lifting covered. You avoid looking at her.

Nepeta sniffs at the freshly uncovered teleport pad, still covered in dust and bits of drywall. She looks up curiously at Karkat. “Are we going to wait for him?” she chirps.

“Wait for what?” Dirk says, looking from her to Karkat.

Karkat glances at the door and seems to weigh his options. “I… no. We can’t. We’ll find him later. Maybe.”

“Who?” Dirk looks even more bewildered.

“Makara,” Equius clarifies, monotone and dark. “We cannot wait for him, and he will not be found. We must go on without him.”

Karkat’s teeth worry at his lower lip, but he nods. “He knows where we’re going. He’ll follow us if he wants. Everybody on the transportalizer.”

Jade’s fingers clasp around your wrist as the power hums to life, and your dad takes the other, and the world melts away around you.

~

All you hear is Dave yelp _“Shit—”_ before you’re underwater.

Jade’s hand rips away from yours in a cloud of bubbles. Your glasses disappear almost instantly – not like you could have caught them if you’d seen them, anyway – and Dad’s hand tightens on your wrist so painfully that you almost jerk away until you realize he’s pulling you back to the surface. You suppress the urge to inhale and let yourself be towed towards the scattered sunlight above you.

Your head breaks the surface and you gasp in a breath of air, thoroughly startled but unhurt, and blink fuzzily around.

The sun is low on the horizon, heavy and golden, and you can’t tell if it’s rising or setting. The light scatters bright flecks on the ocean that surrounds you on all sides. You flick hair out of your eyes and squint, and – there. About ten yards away, a bright orange buoy bobs on a thick platform base.

“There,” you say out loud and turn to point it out to Dad, but he’s not there.

Before you have time to panic, he resurfaces, pulling a coughing Tavros with him. “Do a headcount,” he calls at Jake, who treads water easily beside Jade.

You do one of your own. Karkat breaks the surface a few feet away, gasping and swearing something about coordinates. Beyond him, Sollux, sans glasses, blinks unhappily in the bright sunlight, his hair plastered flat to his skull and making his horns seem longer than usual.

Equius holds Nepeta as far out of the water as he can manage. She clings to him, eyeing the surface like it’s acid. Kanaya finally emerges, coughing and flicking water out of her eyes, but she seems no worse for her trip underwater. Terezi, for once, has lost her trademark shark grin and seems unsure of quite how to stay afloat. She has one hand tightly wrapped around Vriska’s horn beside her. Vriska, whose hair hangs in lank sheets like the girl from The Ring, grits her teeth but allows her to do so.

Dave coughs shallowly, once or twice, but when you turn to look at him he gives you a watery thumbs-up. His shades are gone, and without them you can see the anxiety starting to bloom in his eyes. You studiously avoid looking at Dirk.

Rose and her mom are already making slow progress to the buoy. “Let’s get this show on the road, kids,” Roxy shouts. “I don’t want to be out in the open water with this Black King thing around, let’s move it!”

The reminder of the Black King kicks you into motion, but Jake interrupts. “Wait, wait. We’re missing two.”

Your heart skips a beat until you hear Rose. “Don’t worry about them,” she says dismissively, offering a hand to Kanaya, who seems to be struggling with her clothes weighing her down. “They’re probably scouting ahead, if anything.”

As if on cue, Eridan pops up beside the buoy and pushes himself up onto the floating platform with practiced ease. His sodden clothes hardly seem to bother him at all. “All the pods are here,” he announces, voice carrying far across the glassy water. Even from here, you can see his earfins flick drops of water in a smooth arc when they flutter. “All of ‘em work. There’s four, they hold four apiece. Everyone group up. Fef’s gone to check if the King is activating. If it is, we’ve only got a few minutes.”

“So if you gotta pee,” adds Roxy, “pee right there in the ocean cause you won’t have time later.”

That sends everyone into high gear, swimming for the buoy like their lives depend on it, and it’s finally starting to hit you that it really does. You kick off your shoes and swim beside Dad, who’s got his hands full with Tavros.

Jade is already on the platform helping Eridan open a pod when you get there. She blinks behind saltwater-streaked glasses at you – how did _she_ manage to keep hers on? That’s unfair – and offers you a hand climbing up. “There’s sixteen of us,” she says without preamble, “if we don’t count Eridan and Feferi. Four per pod. So—” she turns and effortlessly heaves Terezi out of the water “—we’re splitting it like this. Karkat, Vriska, Terezi and Sollux go in the first pod. The next pod is gonna have Tavros, Equius, Nepeta, and Kanaya. Their jobs will be to check if there are any guards and neutralize them if there are, make sure the transportalizer is working, and send the airstrip to the surface. Then they’re all going back up to fight off the Black King.”

You briefly wonder if Jade’s planned this out ahead of time, and if so, why everyone seems to just be taking her word as law. Karkat is already guiding Terezi into the open pod. You nod at Jade to keep going.

“Pod Three has the grownups. Pod Four has you, me, Dave, and Rose. We should be able to communicate with Gl’bgolyb from inside DERSE-1.” She offers no further explanation. Instead, she turns and gestures at Tavros in the water. He yelps as he rises none too gently out of the water and drops heavily on the platform. Jade winces. “Sorry. I’m still kind of shitty at this.”

“First pod’s ready to go,” Eridan announces over Tavros’s mumbled _no it’s fine._ “Load up the next one an’ I’ll show them both the way down.”

Jade helps Tavros into the second empty pod while you turn and help pull Dad up onto the platform. You feel like you should say something to him – you know that in spite of the glass-smooth water and the weak sunlight, you’re all in very real danger. Just under the waves is an eldritch beast with power you wouldn’t have thought existed weeks ago. And you can’t even imagine what this Black King can do.

You know you should say something, but when you finally take a breath to do it, Jade interrupts you. “Pod Two is sealed up. Eridan, take them down. Try not to let the Black King kick your ass too hard, okay?”

Eridan nods once, short and businesslike, and slips smoothly back into the water. Both pods vanish after him, bubbling.

Suddenly it’s just the eight of you left on the platform.

Jade leans over the edge of the platform and opens up another pod bobbing carelessly on the surface, but she doesn’t urge anybody in. She just looks up at you, then her grandfather, and then back down at the trailing bubbles from the pods.

“I don’t like you going without us,” Roxy says flatly.

“Me neither,” says Dirk.

“We’ll be in sight,” Rose points out quietly, just audible over the lapping waves. “Right beside you. Don’t worry.”

 _Don’t worry._ Don’t worry, even as you’re all taking little glances at the horizon, waiting for the waves to part and an android the size of a skyscraper to rise up. Waiting for a cough-syrup-red starship to sink out of the clouds. Waiting to turn and see Dualscar Ampora levelling a rifle between your eyes.

Roxy kneels down and pulls Rose into a tight hug, smoothing her soaked hair down. “We’re always gonna worry,” she says. “You’re our kids.”

Part of you aches when she says that. You’ve never had a mom. You’ve never really wanted one, either – it’s always been just you and Dad and a Nanna you only know from photos and the urn on the mantel. But your chest goes tight anyway as Rose wraps her arms around her mom’s neck and almost-clings to her like a fourteen-year-old girl just _doesn’t_ unless she doesn’t think she’ll see her mom again.

You’re not sure how long you all stall for, but it’s long enough that a grating rumble that sets the glassy water shaking takes you all by surprise. Jade pushes her salt-streaked glasses back up her nose and peers anxiously into the water. “That’s probably the airstrip coming up,” she says. “Or… I mean, it _could_ also be an angry demon drone. We should probably go, either way.”

As if on cue, a pair of horns part the surface by the buoy, followed by the rest of Feferi’s head. A set of nictitating eyelids slide away when she blinks. “The King’s powering up,” she says, spitting seawater when she talks. “Are you ready?” She addresses this to Jade.

“We’re ready.” She motions at you. “Hop in.”

You do.

The pod rocks a little when you drop through the hatch, but it’s surprisingly stable for something so small. It’s about the size of a twin bed, plain gray and clearly unused for several years. There are four seats – a little cramped, but hey, you aren’t about to complain – and the front two resemble a very tiny cockpit, complete with buttons, switches, a joystick, and a thick window. Assuming you won’t be expected to drive this thing, you take one of the back seats.

Rose drips water on you when she slips through the hatch and half-climbs over you to take one of the front seats. You let her. It’s not like you’re going to get any wetter. Out in the ocean, the rumbling gets steadily louder.

Dave hops down next and takes the seat next to you. Without his aviators, you can see exactly how bruiselike the dark circles under his eyes are. You resolve to get him a new pair before all this is over. He won’t meet your eye.

Jade’s voice drifts down into the pod – from what you can tell, she’s giving last-minute instructions to her granddad on how to operate the pod. Though, given Jake’s proficiency with tech like this, you privately think it’s just her way of saying goodbye to him. A moment later, she jumps down, closes the hatch behind her with a hiss of air, and clambers over you and Dave to the driver’s seat.

“Okay,” she says, flicking switches. The pod powers on, humming to life around you. “So. I hate that we had to lie like that too, but we’ve all just got to live with it.”

Your heart skips a beat. “What?”

“We’ll pretend to have pod trouble. Feferi will take them on ahead and send Eridan back for us. He’ll guide us down to where Gl’bgolyb is.”

“Wait, wait, wait, _what?”_ You look from her to Rose in bewilderment. “What are you talking about?”

Dave sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose like a middle-aged mom. “Dude, it’s not _our_ fault you decided to Indiana Jones yourself into a rescue mission in the middle of the night and missed all the planning.”

You stare at him in slowly blooming fear.

“We’re not going to DERSE-1,” Rose explains. “We never were. But they”—she nods at the pod slowly descending outside the window—“never would have let us go if we told them the real plan.”

“What _is_ the real plan?” You’re on the verge of panic now and whirl back to Dave. “What the _hell_ are we doing?!”

“We’re going down to see this thing in person,” he says, finally looking you in the eye. “It doesn’t want to tell us how to take down CrockerCorp. It wants to fucking die.”

You can’t find words. All you manage is a weak, croaking “What?”

Jade takes over, pulling a lever as she talks. “Gl’bgolyb is a slave to Crocker. The only way to get out of her control is if It’s killed. So we’re going to kill It.”

“It told me all of this the night you left,” Rose says quietly over the hiss of the bubbles as the pod starts to descend. “It practically begged.”

Your mouth is dry. You try and fail to swallow a few times. “But… how are we supposed to kill this thing? It’s supposed to be, like… _huge?”_

“Roughly the size of Manhattan,” Rose clarifies. “I asked for a method, and It said something to the effect of _‘Psionic power is not unlimited.’”_ She flips a toggle at Jade’s gesturing, and headlights click on in the pod. “If it can be drained of all its power very, _very_ suddenly, then Gl’bgolyb will die.”

The realization dawns. “The Black King. The fight.”

Jade nods and grips the joystick with both hands, but doesn’t move it. “They aren’t so much trying to distract it as… use it as a psionic punching bag. And as an added bonus—” She cuts off as something dark flashes across the window. You jump a little before it comes back into view and it’s just Eridan, earfins pulsing as he squints in the headlights. He’s removed his shirt at some point, and the lines of gills striping his ribcage unsettle you. He jerks his head in a clear _Follow me_ gesture and turns to swim down. Jade eases into the joystick and follows him.

“As an added bonus,” she continues as if there had been no interruption, “apparently the Empress herself got a call from her favorite minion, saying that Prospit was in ashes and they only found one Zodiac child. Who they then killed.”

 _“Why_ is that a bonus?” you rasp. God, your mouth is dry. You try to quietly clear your throat.

“Cause she’s gonna push her little psionic engine to the breaking point trying to come back,” Dave explains. “She’s helping us.”

“So,” Rose says, “if we succeed in killing Gl’bgolyb before she returns, she’ll be trapped in space with no way to return. Her Helmsman is her only source of power up there. If we cripple her before she hits the atmosphere, she won’t come back. _Ever.”_

“And if she shows up before then…” Dave shrugs. “Shit, it’ll be a party, at least.”

You’re dizzy with vague panic. You lean your forehead on the back of Rose’s seat and take a few deep breaths. Mercifully, your friends don’t say anything else.

The ocean outside the window gets darker and darker. The only living thing you’ve seen on the other side of the glass is Eridan, whose horns catch the headlights and reflect them in strange flashes. He never looks back to make sure you’re following.

“How far down is it?” Dave asks Jade, leaning up into the front to peer at the controls. The seawater is starting to dry out of his hair, leaving it sticking up in weird ways.

Jade bats him away. “Feferi estimated it would be about a thirty-minute dive. It might be longer. She said she’s never made the trip herself.”

A long, muffled boom vibrates through the water, loud enough for you to hear over the pod’s engines. Outside, Eridan twists and looks intently up towards the surface. He has the same milky nictitating eyelid you saw on Feferi, and it makes him look even less human than he usually does. When he bares his shark teeth at whatever he sees on the surface, it really doesn’t help. After about fifteen seconds, the booming stops, and Eridan twists and dives again, swimming faster this time.

“What was that?” you manage.

“Don’t know.” Jade kicks the engines up a notch to keep up with Eridan. “But I think it would be safe to say the Black King is awake.”

~

The rest of the dive passes in tense silence. Once or twice, Eridan pauses in the headlights; you think to catch his breath. His gills pulse in quick succession, and whenever he starts swimming again it’s less strongly than before. You’re deep enough now that you can easily imagine there’s not much oxygen for his gills to pull.

Eventually, he drifts to a stop and turns back to the window. He plants one lightly shaking hand on the thick glass, and uses the other to point straight down. Then he takes off again, going back up to join the fight.

“Showtime,” you say to nobody in particular. No one responds. Jade pulls a handle, and with a hiss of air bubbles from somewhere, the pod begins to sink down.

It takes about ten more minutes before the pod crunches to a jarring halt on the ocean floor – almost a full hour since you first sunk below the surface. The world outside is so completely dark that the memory of sunlight on glassy water feels like it happened days ago. All that the headlights illuminate is a flat, featureless plain of brown-black silt, some of it still drifting back down from where the pod plowed some up.

You trade a look with Dave. What now?

No sooner do you look back out the window than something mammoth and dead-white snakes in front of the pod. It’s huge – taller than the pod by far, taller than a semi-truck – and only when it circles you do you realize exactly what it is.

It’s the tip of a very large, very strong tentacle; and it’s scooping up the entire pod like you’d pick up a fallen pea.

You hold your breath. You can’t help it. The pod creaks and jolts as the tentacle lifts it off the seafloor, and for a terrifying instant you think it’s going to crack right open. You’ve heard all the stories about what happens to divers who go too deep – hell, you remember hearing about the Byford Dolphin when it happened – and almost convulsively you throw your mind out and catch every molecule of air inside the pod, hoping if something breaks you can keep the bubble together long enough to get out of this dead zone.

But Dave half-reaches out to you and mumbles “No, don’t worry. It just wants to talk.”

You open your mouth to protest, but he cuts you off. “Really, John, don’t worry.”

There it is again. Don’t worry. But it means something different coming from Dave, and you can see the glazed mists-of-reality bullshit that his shades aren’t covering anymore, so you try and force yourself to relax. If Dave says it’ll be okay, you have to trust it’ll be okay.

The tentacle drags the pod through the water almost leisurely, never rushing, for all the world behaving like a particularly placid flight attendant. As it does, other tentacles emerge from the dark, drifting so slowly they don’t even stir up the silt, gentle as kelp, white as a military graveyard, and nightmarish as the deep ocean around you. Besides them, nothing else moves. It’s getting colder.

The forest of drifting white tentacles grows denser until they surround the now-unnervingly-fragile pod on every side, rippling and flowing with currents you can’t feel. You realize you’re holding your breath again and force yourself to let it out and draw another as the white tentacles snake by. There are enough now that they bump against the sides with a noise like skin on stone.

The dense tentacle jungle parts and then there’s an _eye._

It’s the size of a suburban cul-de-sac and entirely covered in film so thick you can’t even see an iris or pupil. The sight of it sends something primal and panicked screaming through your brain and chants _get away get away get away_ to the rhythm of your pounding heart, but you grip the sides of your seat, clench your teeth, and you don’t look away.

 _“Shit,”_ Dave hisses with feeling. You can’t help but agree.

The tentacle releases the pod and vanishes somewhere into the writhing mass. The pod settles back onto the seafloor, kicking up sediment, and something _happens._

You really aren’t sure _what_ happens, exactly, but the tentacles whip in a sudden frenzy, so fast they’re just a streaking white blur outside the window, and the whole world sort of heaves, once, in every direction at once with a vast, enormous **_glub._**

Then the tentacles are still again, and the water is gone.

No, it’s not _gone,_ exactly – you can see it several feet upwards, rippling and dripping like there’s a leaky dome overhead, but the pod rests on damp, bare sand. You’re in a waterless bubble, like an upside-down fishbowl.

Rose stands up and unseals the hatch and you just about have a stroke. “Rose—!” You bolt upright to stop her, even as the hatch swings open and she turns to you, eyes as white and filmy as the colossal one in front of you, hair bone-white and drifting around her face like seaweed, like tentacles…

 _“Gof’nn…”_ she whispers and you realize It’s talking through her like it always has. _“Grah’nn… Nog sgn’wahl.”_

Chills creep down your spine and you think you almost understand. It wants you to come out. It wants you to share its space.

Rose calmly raises herself out of the hatch and disappears over the side. You look at Dave, who stares right back at you with wide red eyes, and you follow Rose, helping Dave up after you.

When your feet hit the seabed, you’re not sure what you were expecting. Sand like concrete, maybe, compressed with a million years under the crushing weight of the planet – but instead it’s so soft your socked feet sink half an inch into it. You spare a precious moment to wish you hadn’t kicked your shoes off to swim.

Jade slides off the pod to stand beside you, Dave at your other side, and Rose glides over the silt to stand in front of the immense blind eye. She turns back to face the three of you, illuminated by only the pod’s headlights, and speaks again.

_“Ya uln h’geb on y’n’ghft-agl, y’n’gha-agl. H’athgt, h’tharanakt. Uaaah… nnn shugg.”_

Dave shivers and pretends he didn’t. “What’s It saying?” he asks no one in particular.

The Rose-not-Rose tilts her head and hums, discordant as whale song, and regards you for a long minute. It strikes you that the world smells of salt and sulfur down here. Then:

“You speak this tongue… yes?” Not-Rose’s words are heavy and slow and far too deep to be anything like Rose, but you nod. Jade does, too. Dave doesn’t move. “You have come,” It says, slow and measured. “Because I have called.”

You nod again.

“Lost ones.” Behind Rose, the mammoth eye rolls, the pod’s headlights glinting off it. Dave jumps. “The word for… _n’gha-agl…_ death place… this is mine. You will make it so.”

You swallow your fear down. “How?” Your voice breaks anyway.

“The battle above has done half your work,” It says with Rose’s mouth. “In the air above… _Hlirgh‘fhalma…_ the woman… she has done much of the other half. She is nearly here.” It goes silent again. Up above, seawater drips through whatever magical barrier is keeping it there, and a growing sense of dread blossoms in your chest.

“Then what are we here to do?” Jade asks, high and tremulous and fierce as you’ve ever seen her.

Not-Rose hums its whale song again. “To finish the spell.”

Water is dripping faster now, in steady streams from several places. You reach out into the darkness and find the smallest pockets of air, long-stagnant fragments of oxygen, and you pull them into the bubble to stop the leaks.

It smiles with Rose’s mouth, twisted and cynical but somehow sincere, and says, “Yes,” and you understand. And with no more fanfare, the film over Rose’s eyes recedes like Feferi’s second eyelids, and the soft blonde leaches back into her hair, and Gl’bgolyb is silent.

“Dave,” you say quietly. “What’s going to happen after this?”

“I don’t fucking _know,_ John, I can’t—”

“You don’t _have_ to know. Just look.” _Because looking takes psionic power,_ you want to explain, but he catches on and his eyes glass over.

Jade sits cross-legged on the ocean floor and a ball of sand rises up in front of her, rippling like water until it looks almost like a basketball-sized Earth.

“Ampora comes to DERSE,” Dave says softly. “Rose’s mom shoots him.”

The ball of sand reforms into the shape of a rifle round. Jade’s hands come up like she’s molding it midair, but she doesn’t touch it.

“And the Black King gets taken down by a group of superpowered, super-angsty teenagers without one single casualty.”

The sand turns into a tiny drone, then breaks in half and collapses into the seafloor. Jade raises it back up again and looks back to Dave expectantly.

“And we somehow get back to the surface in time to see the Empress’s ship come crashing out of the sky.”

The sand recreates the scene. You sit beside Jade. Rose comes and sits with you. She forms a little ball of white magic – it’s so much gentler and softer than the glare of the pod’s flickering, fading headlights. It’s such a beautiful light that you almost forget to hold the bubble together. It’s all yours, now. You’re not sure when Gl’bgolyb stopped holding the water back, but suddenly you’re struggling to keep the barriers in place. Leaks spring again in a few places, and as they do, you notice that the pod’s engines are dead silent behind you. The headlights are as dark as the advancing ocean around you.

You realize, then, that you’re going to die here.

“We’re all hailed as saviors of the waking world or something.” Dave’s voice cracks and you know he’s realizing it too. “And… and we all get to go home.”

Your nose starts to bleed. You let it.

Jade’s sand falls back into the ocean floor and rises up again as a lighthouse on a hill. A miniscule dog runs down the hillside. You think Jade might be crying, but you can’t spare a look to see.

Dave doesn’t say anything else. It’s just as well. You probably couldn’t have listened anyway. At least now you can remember the last thing he’ll say to you.

_And we all get to go home._

Gl’bgolyb shudders once, tentacles spasming, mammoth eye rolling.

You think about your dad. You don’t remember saying goodbye to him – fuck, you can’t remember saying _anything_ to him. You hadn’t known. You thought you were going to see him again… what had he thought, when your pod didn’t follow his? Did he try to come back for you? You can’t imagine that he wouldn’t. He loves you – he’s been so careful to make sure you know, every day of your life, that he loves you more than life. And he’s never going to see you again and it’s going to _break_ him.

Rose’s light sputters and in the guttering light you see the blood on her face, too – blood and tears and seawater because she is fourteen and terrified of dying and desperately wants her mom. She deserves better than this, you think beyond the cracking strain of your mind stretched beyond its limits. She doesn’t deserve to die here, crushed under the weight of the world.

None of you deserve it. You are _children._ And you _deserve_ a better death than this.

Gl’bgolyb is dying and you reach out and find the outermost edges of your upside-down fishbowl bubble, gathering the ragged corners in your grip like a mental tablecloth. You’re bleeding – you’re dizzy – fuck, you’re probably already brain damaged – but _they deserve better than this._

You grab Dave’s wrist with a numb hand. You grab Jade’s with the other. As Rose’s light goes out, you pull them both forward and close your arms around her too.

_They deserve better than this._

The bubble shifts, wavering at the edges, shrinking by the second, but you steel the shredded remnants of your mind and tell it to _move._

Everything goes blurry and unfocused and it feels like someone took an icepick to your temple, but it moves, jolting and bobbing and rising off the seafloor – and you rise with it, in spite of the freezing water that sloshes around your feet that you can only feel distantly.

You’re not going to survive the trip. But you don’t have to. You just have to make sure _they_ survive. You think you’re okay with dying, as long as they get out alive.

_They deserve better than this._

You leave the dying god below and rocket through the cold dark as the shrinking bubble dissolves, faster than the pod went, faster than you would dare to go if you weren’t about to die with Rose bleeding and crying in your arms and Dave so desperate to go home and Jade who just wants it all to be over.

_They deserve better than this._

Gl’bgolyb dies somewhere beneath your feet with a shuddering gasp and it sends its last death throes out with a psionic shockwave that evaporates what’s left of your bubble – but you’re close to the surface, you can feel the heat of the sun somewhere above you, and the part of your brain that’s still alive is kicking feebly against the drag of gravity. You inhale seawater and it doesn’t even sting.

Your vision is graying and the world is a liquid prism of blue and red, and you think the red is your blood until it’s not – it’s a ship, it’s her ship, powerless and in the grip of gravity, garish red and more doomed than you, breaking to pieces in the lowest levels of the atmosphere and falling

and falling

Dave breaks the surface and you can feel his choking retching hacking breaths of life like they’re your own but every time your chest convulses it just sucks in more water and

something crashes into the surface and streaks white through the water like a comet, like an avenging angel with burning green eyes, and even though you reach for it, every time you kick you sink a little further down but it’s okay because it’ll get them first, they need to be saved more than you because they deserve

god you just want it

to stop

hurting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short epilogue coming up in a day or two.


	17. EPILOGUE

_Flashing green and white and pinned-back ears_

_Paws as big as dinner plates_

_Drip drip drip on sodden asphalt_

_You’re not breathing_

_Dirk trying to bring you back but every breath he breathes into your lungs just brings up seawater and blood_

_Dad sobbing your name like he’ll never say anything else_

_Rose shivering wet red-eyed and you can’t tell what’s the ocean and what’s tears_

_Aradia’s enormous grin as she takes your hand with reassurance in her eyes_

_It’s time to go she says_

_Nanna hugs you tighter than you’ve ever been hugged before_

_until you can’t hear your name being shouted broken over the sound of the ocean_

_and you go._

~

I’m really not okay.

Nobody else is okay either, though. So it’s not like it’s just me.

It took Becquerel about five minutes to find John out there. By then, there really wasn’t much we could do. Bec had teleported all of us onto the airstrip right above DERSE-1, where the Zodiac kids were trying to recover from the fight with the Black King. Dirk tried to get John breathing again for almost an hour.

I really don’t like thinking about that first hour or so.

Eventually Grandpa had to make Dirk stop trying to bring John back. Dirk took it… really hard.

Crocker’s ship crashed a few miles from DERSE-1. Feferi went out and looked over the damage with Sollux. From what they said, the ship started losing power and breaking apart as soon as it hit the atmosphere. Then the Helmsman died, Becquerel broke loose and came for us, and Crocker…

Well, they found her in the wreckage. Most of her. I really don’t like thinking about that, either. At least she won’t be hurting people anymore.

I talked to Karkat a little bit before we left again. He said that the Black King fight was pretty intense. I almost made a Pacific Rim joke about it, but nobody would have gotten it except John anyway, so I didn’t bother. I just said thanks. And we left them there. Becquerel took us home to the island, and we left the Zodiac kids there. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to them. They did have the transportalizer, after all. Who knows where they are now.

Bec took us to the island, I think because he didn’t know the lighthouse was destroyed. He looked really upset when he saw the top half of the tower just sort of lying there. He ran around for a minute and it was just… fixed. Right back how it used to be. Sometimes I forget my Bec is sort of a god, too.

We buried John the same day he died. Dave and his brother went out and made a grave about fifteen minutes’ walk from the lighthouse. Nobody said much.

Becquerel keeps trying to help. I don’t think he understands. I think he feels ashamed. Like if he’d been there just a little sooner, he could’ve saved John. He thinks he failed. I want to blame him, a little bit. I want to blame somebody and yell and hit things. But it’s not Bec’s fault. I was there. John started to die right there on the bottom of the ocean. Nobody could have saved him. Not even Becquerel.

It’s been about five days since then.

James disappeared yesterday. No trace of him. The whole world is still sort of reeling and trying to get its shit back together, so I don’t think we’ll find him in the mess. Dirk says not to worry about him, that he just needs time to cope. I don’t believe him. He took John’s grandmother’s ashes with him, so I don’t think he’s coming back. One time I saw Dirk using some of Grandpa’s software to run facial recognition on global unidentified suicide victims. I pretended I didn’t see.

Dave hasn’t said a single word. Not to anybody. I’m starting to worry about him, but Grandpa says not to. He says Dave will talk when he’s ready. I believe Grandpa, though. Dave will be okay. I think it would help if he had his shades back. John gave them to him for his birthday a year or two ago. I think Dave needs them back. I’ll have Bec see if he can go fetch them for me.

Rose sleeps in her mom’s room now. They’re both pretty quiet.

I go sit and talk to John every day, though. I try not to be too sad or angry when I do, but it’s hard. So I sit and I tell him about stupid stuff, like how Rose somehow still has her knitting supplies and that’s practically all she does now. Or I’ll tell him about the weather, or about how the world is trying to unfuck itself after all that’s happened, or just dumb shapes I see in the clouds. I think he’d appreciate it. Plus, nobody else ever really goes out to talk to him. I don’t want him to be lonely. I know it’s dumb, but it makes me feel better.

I’ve started dreaming about him, which is probably normal, given the circumstances. I always dream I’m in a big golden city with all these cathedrals and castles and towers and stuff. It’s really pretty, and sometimes there are people walking around who are really friendly, even though they’re sort of just pale indistinct dream-pawns. Usually I just walk around looking at things and talking to people until John shows up.

He always seems really happy. I’m glad my dreams want to picture him like that, instead of the last time I saw him. He’s excited to see me, and he wants to show me around. He’s always very careful to show me the clouds. He says they’re important. Maybe that’s why I go tell him about the clouds I see when I’m awake? I don’t know.

I’ve only been having these dreams for three nights now. I hope they don’t stop, I really look forward to them now. Last night John said he’d try and teach me how to fly. I know it’s dumb, but I really hope he does. Everyone is so sad here. I want to fly away and never come down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! New projects are in the works, but I have a rigorous school term ahead of me so it may have to wait a few weeks. Thank you all so much for reading & commenting, I'm still not over how many people actually like my stuff!


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